ItalyTraveller experience.

90 artists - 77 participating countries - 44 collateral events and the multicultural theme of Making Worlds. This is the 53rd edition of Venice's Biennale Art exhibition, which features installations, paintings, drawings, video, film, sculpture, and performance, on show in the Giardini and Arsenale and a number of other locations in the lagoon city. Seven key points:

The Palazzo delle Esposizioni.
The Biennale Gardens contain 29 pavilions including the polifunctional Palazzo delle Esposizioni, as the old Italian Pavilion has been renamed. Palazzo delle Esposizioni functions all year round, housing exhibitions and the ASAC, Historic Archives of Contemporary Art, complete with library and reading rooms.

Homage to Marinetti.
The new Italian Pavillion, in the Arsenale, has been significantly enlarged to provide some 1800sqm of exhibition space. The Collaudi exhibition pays homage to the ideator of futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with a selection of works, all of which invite spectators to reflect on the vitality of the present, created ad hoc by some 21 artists, including Sandro Chia, Marco lodola and Daniele Gallliano.

Homage to Cascella.
Another exhibition on show at the Italian Pavilion is the Homage to Pietro Cascella, containing a number of emblematic works of sculpture by the artist including the previously un-exhibited Ara Pacis (2006). The most famous of the artist's installations are also present, in the form of a series of gigantographs.

Hic sunt leones.
The Golden Lion for the best national participation was awarded to the USA, represented by the renowned installation artist Bruce Nauman whose Topological Gardens, with the ground breaking sound-installation Days extends beyond the American pavillion to the universities of Ca' Foscari and Iuav Tolentini.
The Golden Lion for best artist went to Tobias Rehberger, the artist who designed Palazzo delle Esposizioni's cafeteria (What you love also makes you cry) . Rehberger's complex scheme of geometric forms and contrasting colors creates a visually disorientating environment far beyond the white cube. Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement were assigned to John Baldessari and Yoko Ono, whose Anton's Memory, hosted by the Bevilaqua La Masa Foundation, was designed especially for rooms of the Palazzetto Tito.

Sala F: place of sharing.
Massimo Bertolini is the artist responsible for the Sala F, in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, a polifunctional space designed to be used primarily as educational area but also as meeting room, auditorium and cinema, with three large tables which can be arranged as needed.

Mirrors, lights, webs.
Three high impact works: Michelangelo Pistoletto's Twenty two less two, installation in which big gild framed mirrors are smashed, creating infinite multiplications, Lygia Pape's Ttéia, a three dimensional work created using carefully lit gold threads in a semi darkened room, and Tomas Saraceno's Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web, installation specially designed for the main lobby of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in which elastic cables have been used to create a giant spider's web representing the origin of the universe.

Greenaway's wedding.
Of the Biennale's many collateral events, Peter Greenaway's vision of Veronese's The Wedding at Cana, is one of the most compelling. The 50 minute long performance, which sees the interplay of images, lighting, music, voices and sounds, is part of Greenaway's Change Perfoming Arts project. The initiative, which intends to visit nine masterpieces, debuted in 2006 with Rembrandt's The Nightwatch at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, followed, in 2008, by Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper in Milan. In Venice, in the Palladian Refectory on the Island of San Giorgio, Greenaway uses a facsimile of the painting and cutting edge multi media technology, bringing to life each of the 126 figures depicted, who then proceed to dialogue in both English and Venetian dialect.