Venice in Concierto barroco by Alejo Carpentier

In the spring of 1974, Alejo Carpentier visited Venice and gave two talks at the Ca’ Foscari University. Venice was the city of Concierto Barroco, the work he was finishing at the time, and it was the city of Antonio Vivaldi, one of the characters in the story. Carpentier wanted to corroborate details of that Venetian splendor that he was recovering through his famous, powerful and sumptuous language. The novel presents the cultural defini-tion of a threatened people and also of the resistance, autonomy and affirmation of each individual. At the end of the novel, when the Indiano returns home and the servant Filomeno must leave for Paris, after attending a Louis Armstrong concert, each one understands the relationship between Europe and America and the cultural crossings that this encounter/disagreement implies, like an enlightenment.