Mirko Vucetich’s Veneto: the Memorials, the Chess Game, and a Sculpture in the Giardini

Ten stops, about 250 km, two or three days: the Veneto of Mirko Vucetich (Bologna 1898 – Vicenza 1975), the architect, sculptor and stage designer who devised Marostica’s living chess game in 1954 and staged it in 1955, and who worked in this plain for the last thirty years of his life. The route runs west to east. It opens at the monument he raised at Pescantina in 1966 for the seven hundred thousand people the town took in as they came back from the camps; climbs to his war memorial at Bolzano Vicentino, two survivors embracing, with no weapon and no helmet anywhere in it; reaches the square at Marostica where his chess game is still played, and the castle where two exhibitions have been devoted to him; crosses the ceramics town of Nove, Bassano del Grappa and the castle of Thiene; and ends in the three places that hold the rest of him. Vicenza, where he died and where the city’s museums received the Breganze donation of his work. Padua, with the sculpture of the Tempio dell’Internato Ignoto. And Venice, where his Primo sonno has stood in the Giardini della Biennale since 1942.