On the water's edge... the spectacles

To the point of designing a grandiose nautical carousel to be operated at night in honour of Charles of Austria, brother of the Emperor. The carousel was conceived by the scholar Giovan Battista Pigna with the architect Pirro Ligorio responsible for its sophisticated stage effects. Imagine the canal of the Montagnola right against the walls completely filled with water. On it floated castles to be attacked, dragons to slay, small boats of armed knights, and flaming iron fountains to illuminate the scene. Isola Beata, they called it, and so be it if a few participants drowned during the spectacle.

On the day of 25th May, for many days prior having prepared a game or frolic to take place in the water at the Montagnola as part of an attack against an enchanted castle, which had to defend itself from adventurous knights... Here is the testimony of a chronicler who was present. [Ippolito Roberti, Cronichetta]

And totally surrounded by water was the stage set par excellence of the Este court: the river island of Belvedere. Here, amid pleasurable entertainment, theatrical productions of Ariosto and Tasso and exotic gardens, the court enjoyed physical well-being and sensory delights in a reflection of itself.

A few hundred metres away, travellers on the Po River near Ferrara would come upon another island - with the opposite effect. No echoes of aristocratic celebrations were heard here. Only silence and desperation shrouded the last hours of the lives of the inhabitants of the Boschetto, where plague victims were quarantined.

Separated by just a few pulls of an oar, the sublime and the wretched, the high and low – as Balzac would say – occupied the same water...