The Foundation

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini was established on 20 April 1951, on the initiative of Vittorio Cini, in memory of his son Giorgio, with the aim of promoting the restoration of the monumental complex of the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore – designed, among others, by Palladio and Longhena – severely degraded after almost one hundred and fifty years of military occupation, and to reintegrate it into the life of Venice to make it an international center of cultural activities, research and meetings of great importance.

In its more than seventy years of history, the Foundation has promoted countless social, cultural and artistic activities in a constant dialogue with other institutions and the most prominent Italian and international representatives of culture and science. It has always maintained a hybrid vocation, between humanism and science, promoting and hosting hundreds of seminars and conferences on contemporary challenges, from a technological, ethical, philosophical and global point of view, bringing together the best researchers and experts at an international level.

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini has transformed the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore into a prestigious venue for international meetings, in the name of dialogue and listening between different visions of the world. Since the 1960s and throughout the Cold War it has been a privileged meeting place for academics and personalities from East and West. In 1971, it signed a programme with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the development of international cultural and scientific activities. It hosted ministerial meetings of the EEC and ECSC, UNESCO, the European Investment Bank, the OECD, just to name a few. In 1987 it was the venue for the G7 and in 2021 for the G20 Economy.

In addition to exhibitions, research activities, study meetings, seminars and training and advanced courses, the Foundation hosts seven Institutes and three Research Centres, that focus on theatre, spirituality, music, art, historical research, and new technologies for the digitalisation and enhancement of the cultural heritage. The first nucleus from which the various Institutes are articulated was established in 1954, as the Centro di Cultura e Civiltà Italiana (‘Centre for Italian Culture and Civilisation’), which immediately became a prestigious place of thought and research of international excellence.

In 2010 the Fondazione Giorgio Cini established a research residence, dedicated to Vittore Branca, the renowned Italianist and former Secretary General of the Foundation. It is a humanities centre that welcomes academics, writers and artists from all over the world who wish to spend a period of study on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Every year the Foundation offers residential scholarships to young scholars from universities and international institutions.

The extraordinary significance of the Foundation is clearly demonstrated by the excellence of the events, documented in publications, organised and hosted on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, as well as by the richness of its cultural heritage (ancient books, drawings, miniatures, tapestries, paintings, furniture, sculptures) and the archive collections, with documentary and photographic archives from all over the world. In 1984, the Gallery of Palazzo Cini in San Vio, in the historic centre of Venice, was added to the Foundation, with its collection of Tuscan and Ferrara Renaissance paintings from Vittorio Cini’s personal collection. On the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Auditorium “Lo Squero” hosts major classical and contemporary music concerts, while its expansive exhibition spaces feature displays dedicated to the most compelling expressions of contemporary art and architecture.

The Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, already inhabited during the Roman period and known as Insula Memmia (‘Memmia Island’), from the eponymous gens that must have owned property here, took its current name following the construction of a church dedicated to Saint George in the first half of the 9th century. In 982, Abbot Giovanni Morosini received the island as a donation from the Doge Tribuno Memmo, with the aim of founding a Benedictine monastery.

From that time, the island and the monastery became a leading spiritual and economic centre, also due to the Doge’s protectorate, which continued until the fall of the Venetian Republic. The complex began to take on its current aspect around the end of the 15th century, with the intervention of the Lombard architect Giovanni Buora, who was responsible of the construction of the Manica Lunga, the former dormitory of the abbey, completed in 1508 with the relief of St. George by Giovan Battista Bregno. His son Andrea was responsible for the construction of the Cypress Cloister, a remarkable example of Renaissance architecture (1517-1526).

The second major architectural intervention was the work of Andrea Palladio, who, appointed first architect in 1560, radically renovated the previous Gothic church, built the new refectory and the second cloister, completed only in 1615. This is one of Palladio’s most beautiful creations with a harmony between empty and full spaces that makes it a perfect place for meditation. It was in the refectory that Paolo Veronese painted the admirable canvas Le Nozze di Cana, conserved in the Louvre Museum since the Napoleonic era.  It was recently ‘returned’ to its original location through the placement of a facsimile made in 2007 by Factum Arte of Madrid.

The Venetian Baldassare Longhena renovated the spaces of the monumental complex with two interventions that marked the beginning of the Baroque season at San Giorgio Maggiore: the Monumental Staircase, which gives access to the abbot’s apartments, begun in 1643, and the Library, from 1654-1671, decorated with the cycle of paintings by the Lucchese painters Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi and the walnut bookcases designed by Longhena. Following the fall of the Serenissima in 1797, the island became a barracks and prison; the military function was maintained later by the Austrian and Italian governments, inaugurating a long season of spoliation and tampering that profoundly changed the face of the monastery.

With the monumental buildings fragmented without criteria and often repurposed for uses that disregarded their historical and artistic value, the island experienced a period of dramatic decay. It was only thanks to the intervention of Vittorio Cini and the restoration directed by Ferdinando Forlati after the Second World War that the abbey complex was restored to its former splendour.

Starting from this first recovery in the 1950s, many areas of the monumental complex and the structures on the island have been restored and returned to public use, even for purposes different from their original ones. An extraordinary example of redesign is the Manica Lunga, the place that once housed the monks’ cells and later the accommodations and dormitories: after a restoration by Michele De Lucchi, completed in 2009, it is now a large library dedicated to the History of Art.

From its earliest years of activity, the Foundation also constructed a series of buildings to house the Maritime Centre (1952) and the Arts and Crafts Centre (1953), both of which operated until the 1970s. Once this important phase of professional training experience (typography, carpentry, tailoring, mechanics) aimed at the city’s young people had come to an end, those same buildings became the home of Le Stanze del Vetro (2012) and Le Stanze della Fotografia (2023). Thus the island’s squero, once an ancient workshop for repairing boats, was transformed in 2016 into a modern and atmospheric Auditorium.

Among the works built ex novo over the years the Teatro Verde (construction began in 1952) is worth mentioning, designed by architects Luigi Vietti and Angelo Scattolin, using demolition material accumulated during the island’s restoration. It is an open-air amphitheatre with around 1.500 seats, consisting of tiers of white Vicenza stone interspersed with boxwood espaliers, so as to give the impression – with the audience seated – of one of those “teatri di verdure” (‘theatres of greenery’) that adorned the Venetian mainland villas. In 1960 it was the turn of the swimming pool, inaugurated two years later, the first to be built in the city and which remained in use for a long time, until its current transformation into a suggestive exhibition centre.

With the creation of the Borges Labyrinth, the Island gives itself a sort of “terzo chiostro” (‘third cloister’), built on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the death of the famous Argentine writer (14 June 1986 – 14 June 2011), designed by Randoll Coate in collaboration with the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges.

Since 2018, the Vatican Chapels have enriched the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in the heart of the Wood. These chapels were conceived as the Holy See’s first pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Inspired by Gunnar Asplund’s Chapel of the Woods, the project was curated by Francesco Dal Co and Micol Forti. The ten chapels, designed by as many famous international architects, originally conceived as temporary installations, have become an integrated part of the Island, transforming themselves into places of meditation and extraordinary beauty.