CORTO MALTESE, DISAPPEAR DOES NOT MEAN DEATH

The Grandma and Corto Maltese in Venice

The Grandma is spending her last hours in Venice. After visiting old friends, she is going to walk across the city accompanied by Corto Maltese and they're going to travel to the past to remember the old Venice during the beginning of the 20th century.

Corto is an old Grandma's friend whose name is possibly derived from the Venetian Corte Maltese, Courtyard of the Maltese, today Corte Contarini del Bovolo, next to Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo. He's a laconic sea captain adventuring. His friends describe him as a rogue with a heart of gold. He is tolerant and sympathetic to the underdog.

Born in Valletta, Malta, on July 10, 1887, he is the son of a British sailor from Cornwall and an Andalusian–Romani  witch and prostitute known as La Niña de Gibraltar. As a boy growing up in the Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Maltese discovered that he had no fate line on his palm and therefore carved his own with his father's razor, determining that his fate was his to choose.

More information: World in words

Although maintaining a neutral position, Corto instinctively supports the disadvantaged and oppressed. The character embodies skepticism of national, ideological and religious assertions.

Chaplin, Hemingway and Corto in Venice

Corto befriends people from all walks of life, including the murderous Russian Rasputin, British heir Tristan Bantam, voodoo priestess Gold Mouth and Czech academic Jeremiah Steiner. He also knows and meets various real-life historical figures, including Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Butch Cassidy, James Joyce, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Frederick Rolfe, Joseph Conrad, Sukhbaatar, John Reed, White Russian general Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, Enver Pasha of Turkey and Sergei Semenov, modelled after Grigory Semyonov.

His acquaintances treat him with great respect, as when a telephone call to Joseph Stalin frees him from arrest when he is threatened with execution on the border of Turkey and Armenia.

Corto's favourite reading is Utopia by Thomas More, but he never finishes it. He also read books by London, Lugones, Stevenson, Melville and Conrad, and quotes Rimbaud. He is present when the Red Baron is shot down, helps the Jivaros in South America, and flees Fascists in Venice, but also unwittingly helps Merlin and Oberon to defend Britain and helps Tristan Bantam to visit the lost continent of Mu.

 

Corto Maltese in Venice

Chronologically, the first Corto Maltese adventure, La giovinezza, happens during the Russo-Japanese War. In other albums he experiences the Great War in several locations, participates in the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution, and appears during the early stages of Fascist Italy. 

In a separate series by Pratt, Gli Scorpioni del Deserto, The Desert Scorpions, he is described as disappearing in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Corto has reappeared to spend some hours with The Grandma and it's not a casualty that he has choose this date: today, is an important day to repair more than 20.000 citizens who suffered illegal war councils. Today is a great day to repair a big part of our recent historic memory.

More information: Corto Maltese Official Web

Disappear does not mean death. 

Hugo Pratt

RETURN TO VENICE: ASUN, BELÉN, EVA & HUGO PRATT

The Grandma ready to sail by gondola

The Grandma is in Venice. She's travelling across the channels enjoying the Venetian culture and the hospitality of its inhabitants. She arrived from Milan on The Orient Express and its first stop has been in the capital of Veneto, where local people celebrated La Biennale last September.

The Grandma loves Venice. She visits this city as times as she can because the city is full of history, art and wonderful people like Asun Holmes, Belén Collins, Eva Collins-Maltese, Marco Polo, Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese.

Download Venice-Guide

Let's go to know a little more about Venice and Hugo Pratt...

The name of the city, deriving from Latin forms Venetia and Venetiae, is most likely taken from Venetia et Histria, the Roman name of Regio X of Roman Italy, but applied to the coastal part of the region that remained under Roman Empire outside of Gothic, Lombard, and Frankish control. The name Venetia, however, derives from the Roman name for the people known as the Veneti, and called by the Greeks Eneti (Ἐνετοί). The meaning of the word is uncertain, although there are other Indo-European tribes with similar-sounding names, such as the Celtic Veneti, Baltic Veneti, and the Slavic Wends.

Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese

The Grandma is a fan of Hugo Pratt's comics, especially Corto Maltese. She wants to talk about an old friend, Hugo, and her memories with him. They shared incredible moments when they travelled around the world.

Hugo Eugenio Pratt (1927-1995) was an Italian comic book creator who was known for combining strong storytelling with extensive historical research on works such as Corto Maltese.

Born in Rimini, Hugo Pratt spent most of his childhood in Venice in a very cosmopolitan family environment. His paternal grandfather Joseph was of English origin. In 1937, Hugo Pratt moved with his mother to Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Pratt's father, a professional Italian soldier, was captured in 1941 by British troops and in late 1942, died from disease as a prisoner of war. The same year, Hugo Pratt and his mother were interned in a prison camp at Dirédaoua, where he would buy comics from guards, and later was sent back to Italy by the Red Cross. In 1944, he was at risk of being executed as SS troops had mistaken him for a South African spy.

More information: Commune di Venezia

After the war, Pratt moved to Venice where he organized entertainment for the Allied troops. Later Pratt joined the Venice Group with other Italian cartoonists, including Alberto Ongaro and Mario Faustinelli. His character Asso di Picche (Ace of Spades) was a success.

Inside Ponte di Sospiri

In the late 1940s, he moved to Buenos Aires. He often travelled to South American destinations like the Amazon and Mato Grosso. During that period he produced his first comic book as a complete author, both writing and illustrating Anna della jungla (Ann of the Jungle).

He moved again to Italy in 1962 where he started a collaboration with the children's comic book magazine Il Corriere dei Piccoli, for which he adapted several classics of adventure literature, including Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.

In 1967, Pratt met Florenzo Ivaldi, and with him created a comics magazine named after his character, Il Sergente Kirk, the hero first written by Héctor Oesterheld. In the first issue, Pratt's most famous story was published: Una ballata del mare salato (A Ballad of the Salt Sea), which introduced his best known character, Corto Maltese.

Corto's series continued three years later in the French magazine Pif gadget. Due to his rather mixed family ancestry, Pratt had learned snippets of things like kabbalism and lots of history. Many of his stories are placed in real historical eras and deal with real events: the 1755 war between French and British colonists in Ticonderoga or colonial wars in Africa and both World Wars. Pratt did exhaustive research for factual and visual details, and some characters are real historical figures or loosely based on them, like Corto's main friend/enemy, Rasputin. Many of the minor characters cross over into other stories in a way that places all of Pratt’s stories into the same continuum.

Pratt's main series in the second part of his career include Gli scorpioni del deserto (five stories) and Jesuit Joe.

The Grandma inside Palazzo Ducale

From 1970 to 1984, Pratt lived mainly in France where Corto Maltese, a psychologically very complex character resulting from the travel experiences and the endless inventive capacity of his author, became the main character of a comics series. Initially published from 1970 to 1973 by the magazine Pif gadget, it brought him much popular and critical success. Later published in album format, this series was eventually translated into fifteen languages.

From 1984 to 1995 Pratt lived in Switzerland where the international success that Corto Maltese sparked continued to grow. Hugo Pratt continued to travel from Canada to Patagonia, from Africa to the Pacific area. He died of bowel cancer on 20 August 1995.

Pratt has cited authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, James Oliver Curwood, Zane Grey, Kenneth Roberts, Joseph Conrad, Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and Jack London as influences, along with cartoonists Lyman Young, Will Eisner, and especially Milton Caniff.

More information: Venice Carnival 2017

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.
 

Jerry Saltz