An adventure to discover Venice: stories, enigmas and text messages

“Venice: The Ruyi” is an extraordinary treasure hunt through streets and across bridges, with challenges and clues to follow up, turning Venice into a mysterious and fascinating playground. The pages in this book have been cut into sections and mixed up, and cannot be recomposed without the right code. The codes are won by solving one enigma at a time, moving from one place to another in the city and in doing so, learning about its monuments and its history, in an extraordinary journey into knowledge and mystery through game-playing.

 

Guiding the experience of each reader-player, in this extraordinary blend of treasure hunt and role-playing, is a mysterious university professor, Carlo Dolfin (in reality a rather complex software program), whom the players dialogue with over their mobile phone, sending and receiving text messages to receive the clues and provide the answers that will take them to the next step.

 

The story on which the book and game are based is rather alarming: at the end of the thirteenth century, Marco Polo returned from China with Chinese emperor Qubilay Khan’s legendary scepter, the Ruyi. After his death, as a series of revolts broke out throughout the Serenissima, the Venetian Republic concealed the magic object in the traveller’s tomb. Today both tomb and scepter have disappeared, but the discovery of a coded diary and the interest in the Ruyi manifested by the Invincibles – a powerful brotherhood that has been pursuing the scepter for centuries - make it critical to find the Ruyi before it falls into the wrong hands.

 

“Venice: The Ruyi” is the first chapter in a saga that will offer the participants an extraordinary, unexpected city, even to the eyes of its inhabitants: outside traditional circuits, the game relates the legends and mysteries that have imbued the history of the greatest city on the sea since its earliest days, from the myth of the sad fairy to that of the missing column; from the story of the mortar that stopped an entire battalion to that of the Venetian sultana. This is a book that is truly suitable for all ages, and can be “played” with various levels of skill, or as a challenge among teams.

 

Conceived in 2008 in collaboration with the company Log607, “Venice: The Ruyi” is part of a series called Whaiwhai, which proposes this extraordinary way of traveling in and getting to know a city. In 2009, the project won the National Prize for Innovation in Services, for the Tourism category, awarded personally by the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano. It was reprinted and distributed by Marsilio the same year.

 

This is one of its pages, “recomposed” for the occasion, and purged of game clues.

 

Between Enlightenment and Alchemy: In Venice the Scuole were meeting places for the Confraternities devoted to a Saint, or Congregations of people who exercised the same profession, who met for prayer, but also for the purpose of helping one another or doing charity work. There were dozens throughout the city, but only six of them had the privilege of calling themselves “Grandi”. The Scuola Nuova della Misericordia, one of the Scuole Grandi of Venice which is located in the homonymous campo at the end of the Fondamenta also called della Misericordia, began construction in 1532 to the plans of Jacopo Sansovino, but was not finished until over fifty years later, when the interior alone was completed in time to receive Doge Nicolò Da Ponte in pompa magna, when he came to attend its inauguration, accompanied by the notables of the Serenissima. This was the first place in the city, along with the adjacent Palazzo Lezze, to be sacked by the French soldiers in 1797. And it is said to be one of the Venetian venues historically tied to free-masonry, whose finality was “the construction of the supreme work of the ideal temple”. The “freemasons” used symbolic figures and ritualistic forms – for their own purposes – with the contribution of alchemists and religiously unorthodox elements. On the side façade of Palazzo Lezze, which forms a corner with the Scuola della Misericordia, there are some very interesting bas-reliefs at the level of the terraces. The one on the lower terrace on the left features a combination of truly arcane alchemic symbols; no less interesting is the one on the right, near the corner, with two harpies and a strange nude figure with a sort of cape holding two bunches of branches. Above, two other marble pieces complete the picture.

It is hard to say whether or not a secret lodge was based there: there is proof of the existence of the earliest lodges in the Serenisssima in the early decades of the eighteenth century: in 1729 Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Grand Master of the lodge of London, visited Vicenza, Verona, Padua and Venice. The headquarters perhaps had its designated venue on board a ship moored at large in the Bacino San Marco. What is certain is that the chronicles confirm the existence of the Lodge of Palazzo Contarini, in Santa Croce, discovered and dismantled on May 6 1785.