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.
But tales of a far more contemporary nature have drawn us away from the crowds in Venice to the peaceful grounds of Pordenone’s Villa Galvani on a recent rainy weekday afternoon.
The villa – which dates back to the 1800s – has since 2018 housed the Paff! International Museum of Comic Art, which comes with a remarkable origin story of its own.
Museum founder Giulio De Vita – a comic artist who has worked for the likes of Marvel and Disney – once took refuge in the grounds of Villa Galvani. He grew up in Pordenone and when the region was hit by a series of devastating earthquakes in the 1970s, his family – along with many others – took shelter in tents pitched in those grounds after their own houses had been destroyed.
De Vita then watched as the villa fell into disrepair while his own career as an artist took off. He always had a nagging thought at the back of his mind that, one day, he’d like to give this venerable building a new lease of life. And so came the idea to combine two of his life’s passions.
Previously, Paff! hosted a massive The Spirit of Will Eisner exhibition – tracing the development of the New Yorker’s groundbreaking The Spirit comic strip and his work on A Contract With God (1978), considered by some to be the first graphic novel.
Paff!’s plans for global promotion were stymied early on by the Covid-19 pandemic, but word has been spreading about this hidden gem for lovers of comics and those fascinated by the creative process.
That much is highlighted when we go to leave and standing in the lobby is Fanny Vlamynck, the 88-year-old widow of Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (aka Hergé), creator of The Adventures of Tintin series. She is taking a private tour of Paff!’s permanent collection, which was opened to the public on March 10.
The current exhibition, The Art of Aardman: Shaun the Sheep & Friends, went on show on May 11 and sits alongside permanent exhibitions that chart the history of comic art.
Paff! has been designed to engage with its audience, and the exhibits call on people to become involved in their visits, by pulling out drawers and opening cabinet doors that house more than 100 years of comic art history.
There’s artwork and mini documentaries that allow you to follow comic art’s evolution from the “funny pages” of newspapers and small comic books to the big screen, or that showcase individual comic strips, backlit to reveal each brush stroke or correction made during creation.
As with the best museums, the experience provides an education and there are the formative works of some of the comic world’s greats on display, from Floyd Gottfredson to Art Spiegelman.
There’s also a celebration of Italy’s own rich comic history, including work by, surprisingly, the country’s only ever world heavyweight boxing champion, Primo Carnera, who, it turns out, inspired a comic strip in the 1940s but also dabbled in the comic arts himself.
The more you explore, the more you want to know.
