On a Hilltop Outside of Vicenza

Is man really the measure of all things? What a historic building in an old Italian town tells us about the Ghanaian community there.

Located on a hilltop just outside of Vicenza, an Italian town designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, sits the Villa Rotonda designed by the 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio. On a recent visit to the site I was struck by how the building and its location cater to a particular type of vision. The building functions as a panopticon that offers the inhabitant a 360-degree view of the world below with Vicenza visible in the near distance. What this view suggests is that the world can be possessed by the gaze of Palladio’s hypothetical inhabitant. In this way the building epitomizes the logocentrism of the West and the primacy given to vision in the production of both knowledge and power.

The cross-like floor plan of the Villa Rotonda and its circular dome centralized within a square registers a fetishization of symmetry and centrality and evokes the abstract concepts of balance, harmony, and purity of form. These concepts are, however, far from neutral. The reductive symmetry of the building calls forth its own ontological status. It can be seen as a metaphor for “modern man” and the humanist dictum that this “man is the measure of all things.” What this dictum omits, of course, is all the men (and women) situated outside the cultural frame so defined by the West. Nevertheless, this dictum continues to be perpetuated. This was clear to me as I overheard the language used by the English and French guides to explain the significance of the Villa Rotonda to their respective tour groups. Such language presents the building as a symbol of supreme order. But this is only part of a much more complex narrative that involves the disjunctive relationship between modernity and colonialism. To consider the Villa Rotonda through the lens of this relationship is to question its autonomy as a white monolith on a hilltop in Italy.

As I looked out from that hilltop amidst the throngs of tourists who had made the pilgrimage to this famous site, I wondered about its relevance to the world today. What troubled me was the way in which the building is presented as a symbolic centre of the world where meaning radiates out from its core. The discourse surrounding the building continues to perpetuate a chain of binaries without ever questioning them. The problem with binaries such as centre/periphery, visible/invisible, civilized/primitive, and master/slave is that they assume an often unspoken hierarchy that is deemed to be naturally ordained. Produced are self-serving themes of timelessness and universality that effectively wash the blood from the hands of those who have profited from the exploitation of others. It is crucial to point out that the Villa Rotonda was built at a time when the transatlantic slave trade was in full force and unspeakable pain was being experienced by many all in the name of humanism.

Such thoughts were with me as I walked down the grassy hill on my way back to Vicenza. I also thought about the disjunctures present in the city itself in terms of its past and present. Vicenza represents the largest concentration of Palladio’s buildings in the world with 23 located in the historic city centre and three (including the Villa Rotonda) located outside the city walls. Of the 110,000 inhabitants of this Palladian city over 5,000 are immigrants from Ghana (there are approximately 23,000 Ghanaians living in Italy today). This community is a particularly visible and vocal one in Vicenza. In fact, the two Ghanaian radio stations in Italy are based here. How does the presence of this community complicate a reading of Palladio and what he represents in terms of Vicenza?

The Italian Renaissance did not unfold entirely in the light of reason but also in the dark holds of slave galleons (including from the area of today’s Ghana) and the genocidal spaces of conquered territories. As I travel to such places as Vicenza, the privilege of my being able to travel is mitigated by the constant reminder that the question of who I am is contingent not only on my own past but by the pasts of others.