There is a way of carrying the name Sorio that this project had not yet encountered: carrying it as the second element of a compound surname, like a tail that drags a history behind it.
Such is the case of Ileana Chiappini di Sorio, and her figure deserves a chapter for two reasons. Because she is one of the most respected scholars of Venetian art of the later twentieth century. And because her surname raises, once again, the question running through this whole enquiry: what binds a person to the word they carry?
A life in Venetian art
Born in 1927, Ileana Chiappini di Sorio devoted her life to the art of the Veneto.
She served as an official of the Museo Correr — the great civic museum on St Mark’s Square, a treasury of Venetian memory — and lectured at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. She was vice-president of the Ateneo Veneto, the city’s historic cultural institution.
Her bibliography is that of a scholar of long standing: a celebrated monograph on Cristoforo Roncalli, known as il Pomarancio, a painter of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; essays on Giovanni Santi, on Perugino, on Giovanni Bellini; studies on the art of silk weaving in Venice; and a book devoted — a delightful and rare subject — to the staircases of Venetian palaces across the centuries.
Five hundred fans
And then there is the collection.
Over a lifetime of study, Ileana Chiappini di Sorio gathered more than five hundred antique fans: one of the largest Italian private collections of these objects, in which art, fashion, craftsmanship and the history of dress are interwoven.
Part of that collection is today on display at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, seat of the Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro, where it continues to recount — through an apparently frivolous object — three centuries of Venetian life.
It is the collector’s gesture in its highest form: turning a private passion into a patrimony everyone can see. And anyone who has followed this research will recognise the movement, having met it before: it is the same as that of Bartolomeo Sorio, who gave his manuscripts to the Biblioteca Civica of Verona. A century and a half apart, two people bound to the word Sorio performed the same act — handing over to the public what they had gathered in private.
The predicate “di Sorio”: an open question
The question of the surname remains.
“Chiappini di Sorio” is a compound surname. Chiappini is a house documented as far back as the fifteenth century, with branches in several Italian regions. The predicate “di Sorio” was added to it at a moment, and by a route, that the sources we have consulted do not document.
It could be a territorial predicate, referring to one of the places called Sorio we have examined. It could be the residue of a union between families. With the customary caution, we record the question without forcing an answer.
Why she belongs in this story
In a sense it is precisely this that makes her figure valuable to our path.
In her surname, the word Sorio is not the name of a family: it is the name inside a name — surviving the way words survive, by attaching themselves to whatever passes.
That the person who carried it should then have spent her life preserving and handing on the beauty of the Veneto is one of those symmetries history produces by chance, and which a piece of research like this one has only the duty to notice.