Comic history on show, from Aardman Animations to Will Eisner, at Italy’s Paff! International Museum of Comic Art
- The museum in Villa Gavani, Pordenone, was founded by artist Giulio De Vita, who took refuge at the villa as a kid after an earthquake ruined his family’s house
- Currently holding a show on Aardman Animations, makers of Shaun the Sheep, the museum also has permanent exhibitions on the history of comic book art
Pordenone is an easy car or train ride about an hour north of Venice, within the rolling vineyards of Italy’s Friuli Venezia Giulia region and seemingly a world away from the constant bustle of that more famous city’s crowded alleyways.
But Pordenone – a riverside town of covered walkways that dates back to Roman times – and Venice share a connection with China that goes back more than 700 years, and to the tales of two travellers.
Marco Polo – Venice’s most famous son – is the better known of the pair, but although Polo stole all the headlines with his jaunts through the “Far East” around 1271, there’s a school of thought that suggests the famed merchant embellished somewhat the details concerning where exactly his travels took him, and when.
There’s no such shade thrown towards Odoric of Pordenone, the Franciscan friar who took to the high seas around 50 years after Polo supposedly did and spent three years in Beijing. His tales, told on his return, have always been considered far more grounded in fact than the Venetian’s.
Such was the popularity of the report Odoric had ghostwritten on his return to Italy (The Travels of Friar Odoric: 14th Century Journal of the Blessed Odoric of Pordenone) that his stories were soon appropriated by an unknown English author who attributed the travels to a “Sir John Mandeville” – and duly had a bestseller on his hands.
