I like very much Corto ! I've all the albums ... Hugo Pratt was a great artist ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Pratt
Hugo Pratt (1927-1995) was from Venice;
here a short piece of him remembering his life in Venice:
I was four or five years old, maybe six, when I accompanied my grandmother to the Old Ghetto of Venice. We went to visit a friend of hers, Mrs. Bora Levi, who lived in an old house. This house was accessed by climbing an ancient wooden staircase called "scala matta" or "scala delle pantegane", or "Turkish stairs". Mrs. Bora Levi gave me a candy. a cup of hot and thick chocolate, and two biscuits without salt. that I did not like. Then she and my grandmother, inevitably, sat and played cards, smiling and whispering phrases incomprehensible to me. And so all I had to do was to carefully examine the hundred miniatures hung on the dark red velvet wall, which were watching me from their glass ovals. I say that they observed me, because these miniatures contained old portraits of strict lords in Hapsburg uniforms or rabbis with black braids and wide-brimmed felts. And each one seemed to be staring at me with an insistence that certainly bordered on invasion.
A little embarrassed I would go to the kitchen window and look down into a grassy square with a real ivy-covered well. That little square has a name: Corte Sconta, also called Arcana. To enter it, seven doors had to be opened, each of which had the name of a Shed, that is, a demon of the Shedim caste, procreated by Adam during his separation from Eve, after the act of disobedience. Each door opened with a magic word, which was then the name of the demon itself. I still remember those terrible names: Sam Ha, Mawet, Ashmodai, Shibbetta, Ruah, Kardeyakos, Nà'Amah.
I remember that one day Signora Bora Levi took me by the hand and led me into the Court, lighting the way with a "menorah", the seven-branched candlestick, and every time she opened a door she blew out a candle. The court was full of sculptures and graffiti: a king armed with a bow and arrows, riding on a god; a newborn baby; a huntress also with a bow and arrows; a cow with one eye; a six-pointed star; a circle drawn on its own for a young girl dance to dance in, naked; the names of the fallen angels of God, Samael, Satael, Amabiel. The Jewish lady told me about all these things, answering my questions. Then she opened a door at the back of the court and led me through a street with tall grasses, which led to another beautiful little square, and which I later found again, just the same and full of flowers, in a house in the Juderia of Cordoba. I remember that there was a very nice lady in that Court, always surrounded by children and girls who played around a giant butterfly of colored glass. It was Aurelia, the Gnostic butterfly. Gnosis presents itself as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, and offers, in a thousand reflections of various colors, what each one desires.
Those two squares intercommunicating through the small hidden alley called "Calle Stretta della Nostalgia", represented the fabled center where two secret worlds joined: one belonging to the doctrines of the Talmud, and the other to esoteric Judaeo-Greek-Oriental teachings. All this maze of stairs, streets, courtyards and small squares was called the "Serraglio delle Belle Idee" or "Serraglio dei Giudei". In this beautiful place my playmates were Jewish children, good at telling me of ancient things, and at climbing over forbidden city walls. In addition, the little girls had disquieting smiles, I read their eyes in the golden shade of the attics. They were the ones to reveal for the first time the Basilides Abraxas (the Demiurge, highest deity of the lower world) and the Pythagorean symbols, the lunar serpents, and the diagrams of Menander and Saturninos. It was in those little squares that I became aware for the first time of the Nine Chapters of Simon Magus, of Mani, Origen, Arius, Valentinus, Justino, Carpocrates, Epiphanios, Tertullian, Augustine, Hypatia, and many others. It was in that enchanted place that I also heard of the Keys of Solomon and of the emerald of Satan, that the hermetic tradition declares to have fallen from the forehead of the angel of evil, becoming the symbol of "cursed Science" among men.
At a certain time, my grandmother decided to return home (we lived on the other side of the city, at Bragora) and at that moment I felt physically the pain of separation from those mysterious friends. Being too young, my parents still would not leave me alone, so I had to wait a week or more to go back to the ghetto. Returning home with my grandmother, we passed through the Rio della Sensa to the Madonna dell'Orto, where the statues of the three Arab brothers are embedded in the walls of the ancient "Fontego dei Mori or Saraceni": El Rioba, Sandi and Afani. When I asked who those gentlemen were, dressed in the "crutch" (turban?). My grandmother replied that they were Moors, Turkish Mamelukes - In short, things matters she made me understand I was not to ask about.
After that grandmother went to play a few numbers in the lottery, in the Venetian Cabal of Lotteries. And in me there remained unresolved these questions about Turks, Saracens, Arabs, that intrigued me so much that I began to ask for explanations from many members of my family. So I learned that the Genero, to which lineage my mother belonged, came from the Toledo in Spain and were of Sephardic-Marrano origin, converted to Christianity as a result of the cruel persecutions that took place in Spain in 1391.
To the Genero were related the Toledani, the Greggyos and the Azim, these last were Byzantine glass-blowers in Murano on the Lagoon. Someone in the family would often speak of Arab merchants and spies who had come to Venice to look for something that the Venetian pirates had stolen. These were everyday topics of conversation among us. I remember one day my uncle took me to a small square hidden next to San Marziale, and pointed to a green marble baton placed inside an alabaster niche, explaining that it was the symbol of a sect of Saracen adventurers, allied to the Templars and to the Teutonic Knights. A few years passed and I began to go alone into the ghetto, consorting more and more eagerly with my friends in the two little squares and their houses.
Then events brought me to Africa. In Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, I rediscovered much of the Venetian environment by attending the Greek-Jewish-Egyptian-Armenian community. In the libraries of Debra Markos, Debra Ghiorghis, Debra Mariam, in the Coptic books and images of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, I discovered that in the lives of men who want to know there are always seven secret doors. And I found that the magic formulas are always sevenfold, and that the devils are the same, the hidden books more or less the same, and the fallen angels a little more numerous. In Coptic literature old stories are read with apocryphal additions. My new friends from East Africa, older than me by a few years, told me wonderful stories about the journeys of Enoch and the Garden of Eden. And the girls smiled with the same disquieting smile as those little girls in the ghetto, though these had majolica eyes, very different from the Venetian-colored eyes of those girls.
The war came and I spent a few years in Dancalia (region in Ethiopia) and in the Ogaden, among the camels and the smugglers of "khat". From a camel driver I learned that to enter Al-Jannah Al Adn, the Garden of Eden, seven doors had to be opened in the desert, and to be able to open them you must know the names of seven terrible angels of the tribe of Shaitan, or be accompanied from a poet who has a golden key under his tongue. From an Eritrean Arab I later learned that the Adriatic was called Giun Al-Banadiqin, the "Gulf of the Venetians", and that the Egyptians called Al Bunduqiyyah the same city of Venice.
I returned to Italy. The war was not over yet, the houses of the Venetian ghetto were closed, the Jews had fled to hide in the homes of the Venetians. At night, softly, old Arabic-Spanish stories were told again, and there was talk of the Kabbalistic city of Safed in Palestine, where there was the tomb of Simon Ben Yohai, believed to be the author of the Zohar, "The Book of Splendors" . And once again, when the high holy days came, I ate cookies without salt that I did not like.
The war ended.
Since then, I come and go throughout the world, almost without any destination. But I always come back to Venice. I walk through its streets, along the canals, I stop on the bridges and observe that on the banks there are no longer the crabs that in the afternoons used to be lazily sunbathing. There have been none for many years. I look for places I knew when I was a child, but many times I do not recognize them. The crazy staircase is gone and not even Mrs. Bora Levi is to be found. The windows of her house are walled up, the physiognomy of the place has changed. When I ask, they cannot answer me. Young people who do not know, or some old man who does not want to remember...
One day, I found the name of the old Jewish lady who gave me the candy and the hot chocolate engraved on a marble slab near the door of the ancient Scuola Espanola, along with those of other Jews who were deported and never returned after the war. Not many names, because Venice hid her Jews, she hid them in her "Corti Sconte", her "Arcane".
Courts are still hidden behind jealous walls, with street numbers that are reinvented when some layman looks too long. The old and faded names remain, written on large white rectangles bordered with black like funeral cards, and the Sorian cats that seem to suggest, almost like a riddle, that everything is there as it once was. We must want to find it. And perhaps we can find it, just beyond the Jewish Bridge, when we enter the taverns, where we can still play with the old Arabic cards, the Saracen, the Mohammedan, or the beautiful Judean, games from the East and from Spain. The Marrano Jews kept their cards, and the old keys of their Spanish houses hanging on the doorposts of the Venetian doors, as if a promise of return for the diaspora willed by the Spanish Inquisition. Even in my own house there is a Spanish key from Toledo: my grandmother bequeathed it to me along with her ironic fatalism and a deck of Arab cards that are surely magic.
On the Fondamenta that goes towards the Madonna dell'Orto and San Marsilian there is a palace with a Teutonic cross, a rose and a stone camel. Perhaps many of these things will not suggest anything, but if you are Venetian in your heart, then you immediately understand that behind a Teutonic symbol there will be something mysterious, and a rose twisted around the cross will complicate the enigma even more. The addition of the camel then, will definitely seduce the inquisitive soul of a Venetian...
(Google translate - eul edited)
radiated mean exposed to a radioactive substance in Italian is 
