Personalities Biography
Eleonora Duse, Vettorato photo
Freya Stark, Enzo Dalla Pellegrina photo
Pietro Bembo, picture by Titian
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PERSONALITIES
The fascination of the art, the magic of the landscape, the ideal of a perfect refuge for the body and the soul have attracted many famous personalities to Asolo; people who have loved the city and lived there, down the ages.
First and foremost three women Caterina Cornaro, Eleonora Duse and Freya Stark had deep ties with the city. Travellers, enterprising, non-conformists and intellectuals of world wide fame they contributed to establishing the very image of Asolo as an ideal of beauty and place of choice.
Caterina Cornaro, former queen of Cyprus, in exile in Asolo from 1489, was able to create a splendid renaissance court in the Castle that bears her name to this day. Eleonora Duse, star of the international theatre world came to rest in Asolo after the demands of the stage and chose to be buried there too. Freya Stark, explorer, author and photographer kept Asolo as her favourite destination when she came back from her journeys and she also is buried there in the cemetery of S.Anna.
The ranks of artists and intellectuals who lived and were seduced by Asolo were also numerous:
Pietro Bembo wrote the "Asolani" in the years he stayed with Queen Cornaro; the nature he immersed himself in still lives in the paintings of Giorgione, Lotto; and Bassano; the grace of the landscape inspired the genius of Palladio, Massari and Canova; Giosuč Carducci called it the "the city of a hundred horizons"; the poet Robert Browning recounted the essence of living as an Asolan through his verses in "Asolando", Gian Francesco Malipiero composed the "Poemi asolani" for piano.
Especially in the century between 1800 and 1900 Asolo seemed to affirm its character as a place of beauty, a spot everyone wanted to live in and cultural tradition attracting illustrious personalities, intellectuals and artists from home and abroad: they included Eugene Benson, Henry James and Carlo Scarpa, Marius Pictor, Filippo De Pisis, Igor Strawinsky, Ernest Hemingway...
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