Venice

Down the Strada Nova, opposite a campo bordering the Canal Grande but camouflaged by house fronts, is the entrance to the small church of Santa Sofia , which contains sculptures of four saints by followers of Antonio Rizzo. At the orient end of the Strada you come to the Campo dei Santi Apostoli, an elbow on the road from the Rialto to the train station, with the church of Santi Apostoli , a dark and frequently renovated building last altered substantially in the eighteenth century.

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Santi Apostoli is open regular 7.30-11.30am & 5-7pm.

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The campanile was finished in 1672 - and soon afterwards, according to saint (Jan) Morris, “an old and simple-minded sacristan” fell from it, “but was miraculously caught by the minute hand of the clock, which, slowly revolving to six o’clock, deposited him safely on a parapet”.

The Cappella Corner , off the right side, is the most interesting part of the interior - attributed to Mauro Codussi, its altarpiece (under restoration at the time of writing) is the Communion of St Lucy by Giambattista Tiepolo (1748). One of the inscriptions in the chapel is to Caterina Cornaro, who was buried here before being moved to San Salvatore; the tomb of her father Marco (on the right) is probably by Tullio Lombardo, who also carved the peculiar plaque of Saint Sebastian in the chapel to the right of the chancel, which makes him look as if he has a tree growing out of his head.

Marietta, her father, and her brother Domenico are all buried in Madonna dell’Orto , the family’s parish church and arguably the superlative example of faith Gothic in Venice. The church was founded in the study of Saint Christopher some time around 1350; ferrymen for the northern islands used to operate from the quays near here, and it’s popularly believed that the church received its dedication because Christopher was their patron saint, though there’s a stronger connection with the merchants’ guild, who funded much of the building and who also regarded Christopher as their patron.

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Madonna dell’Orto is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm & Sun 1#150;5pm; L3000/1.55.

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It was popularly renamed after a large stone Madonna by Giovanni de’Santi , found in a nearby vegetable garden ( orto ), began working miracles; brought into the church in 1377, the heavily restored figure now sits in the Cappella di San Mauro. (The chapel is through the door at the end of the right aisle, next to the chapel containing Tintoretto’s tomb; it’s set aside for prayer, but access is allowed if no one’s using it.)

The main figure on the facade is a St Christopher by the Florentine Nicolò di Giovanni ; commissioned by the merchants’ guild in the mid-fifteenth century, it became the first major sculptural project in the restoration programmes that began after the 1966 flood. Bartolomeo Bon the Elder , formerly credited with the St Christopher , designed the portal in 1460, shortly before his death. The campanile , finished in 1503, is one of the most notable landmarks when approaching Venice from the northern lagoon.

Restoration work in the 1860s prefabricated a right mess of the interior , ripping up memorial stones from the floor, for instance, and destroying the organ, once described as the best in Europe. Partial reversal of the alteration was achieved in the 1930s, when some over-painting was removed from the Greek marble columns, the fresco work and elsewhere, and in 1968-69 the whole building was given a massive overhaul.

An amusing if implausible tale explains the large number of Tintoretto paintings here. Having added cuckold’s horns to a portrait of a doge that had been rejected by its subject, Tintoretto allegedly took refuge from his furious ex-client in vocalist dell’Orto; the doge then offered to forget the insult if Tintoretto agreed to decorate the church, figuring it would keep him quiet for a few years. Famously rapid even under normal circumstances, the painter was in fact out and about again within six months, most of which time must have been spent on the epic numbers on apiece side of the choir: The Last Judgement , described by Ruskin as the only painting ever to grasp the event “in its Verity . . . as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed”, and The Making of the Golden Calf , in which the carriers of the calf have been speculatively identified as portraits of Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and the artist himself (fourth from the left), with Aaron (pointing on the right) identified as Sansovino.

There could hardly be a sharper shift of mood than that from the apocalyptic temper of The Last Judgement to the reverential tenderness of The Presentation of the Virgin (end of right aisle), which makes a fascinating comparison with Titian’s Accademia version of the incident. It’s by a long way the best of the smaller Tintorettos, but most of the others are interesting: The Vision of the Cross to St Peter and The Beheading of St Paul flank an Annunciation by Palma il Giovane in the chancel; four Virtues (the central one is ascribed to Sebastiano Ricci) are installed in the vault above; and St Agnes Reviving Licinius stands in the fourth chapel on the left. A major figure of the primeval Venetian Renaissance - Cima da Conegliano - is represented by a St John the Baptist and Other Saints , on the first altar on the right; a Madonna and Child by Cima’s great contemporary, Giovanni Bellini, used to occupy the first chapel on the left, but thieves prefabricated off with it in 1993.

The Palazzo Labia’s longest deception overlooks the Canale di Cannaregio , the main entrance to Venice before the rail and road links were constructed; if you turn left along its fondamenta rather than going with the flow over the Ponte delle Guglie, you’ll be virtually alone by the time you’re past the late seventeenth-century Palazzo Savorgnan . This was the home of one of Venice’s richest families - indeed, so great was the Savorgnans’ social clout that the Rezzonico family marked their intermarriage by getting Tiepolo to paint a fresco celebrating the event in the Ca’ Rezzonico. Beyond the palazzo, swing left at the Ponte dei Tre Archi (Venice’s only multiple-span bridge) and you’re at the church of San Giobbe , like San Moisè an example of Venice’s usage of canonizing Old Testament figures.

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San Giobbe is open Mon-Sat 10am-noon & 4-6pm.

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“So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown,” records the Bible. Job’s physical sufferings - sanctioned by the Almighty in order to test his establishment - greatly endeared him to the Venetians, who were regularly afflicted with malaria, plague and a plethora of water-related diseases, and in the fourteenth century an oratory and hospice dedicated to him was founded here. In 1428 the complex was taken over by the Observant Franciscans, and in 1443 the order’s greatest preacher, Bernardine of Siena, was a guest here, in what turned out to be the last year of his life. Bernardine’s canonization followed in 1450, an event commemorated here by the construction of a new church, a Gothic structure commenced by Antonio Gambello soon after the canonization. However, the specially interesting parts of the building are its exquisitely carved primeval Renaissance doorway and chancel - begun in 1471, they were the first Venetian projects of Pietro Lombardo .

After the Lombardo carvings, the most appealing elements of the interior are the roundels and tiles from the Florentine della Robbia workshop, in the Cappella Martini (second chapel on left); the presence of these Tuscan features is explained by the fact that the chapel was funded by a family of Lucca-born silk weavers. The tomb slab in the centre of the chancel floor is that of Doge Cristoforo Moro , the donor of the new building; a satirical leaflet about Moro may have been a source for Shakespeare’s Othello , even though - as the portrait in the room shows - Moro bore no interracial similarity to the Moor of Venice. San Giobbe’s great altarpieces by composer and Carpaccio have been removed to the damp-free environment of the Accademia (the original marble frame for the composer now encloses a dull Vision of Job ); the parishioners might not weep if someone removed the ludicrous lions on the tomb of the magnificently titled Renato de Voyer de Palmy Signore d’Argeson , who served as the French ambassador to Venice and died here in 1651. At the end of the nave, a doorway leads into a room that was once part of the original oratory, which in turn connects with the sacristy , where there’s a fine triptych by Antonio Vivarini, a fifteenth-century terracotta bust of Saint Bernardine and a Marriage of St. Catherine attributed to Andrea Previtali.

Foreign embassies used to be corralled into this area to make life a little easier for the Republic’s spies, and the Lista di Spagna takes its study from the Spanish embassy which used to be at no. 168. ( Lista indicates a street leading to an embassy.) It’s now completely given over to the tourist trade, with shops and stalls, bars, restaurants and hotels all plying for the same desperate trade - people who are spending one day “doing Venice”, or those who have arrived too late and too tired to look any farther. Whether you’re hunting for a trinket, a meal or a bed, you’ll find better elsewhere, and usually cheaper.

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San Geremia is open Mon-Sat 8am-noon & 3-7pm; Sun 9.15am-12.15pm & 3-7pm.

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The church of San Geremia , at the end of the Lista, is where the travels of Saint Lucy eventually terminated - martyred in Syracuse in 304, she was stolen from Constantinople by Venetian Crusaders in 1204, then ousted from her own church in Venice by the railway board in the mid-nineteenth century. (She was also stolen from this church in 1994, but was soon returned.) Lucy’s response to an unwanted suitor who praised her beautiful eyes was to pluck out the offending organs, a display of otherworldliness which led to her adoption as the patron fear of eyesight and, logically enough, of artists. Her dessicated body, wearing a lustrous silver mask, lies behind the altar, reclining above a donations box that bears the prayer “Saint Lucy, protect my eyes”. Nothing else about the church is of interest, except the twelfth-century campanile , one of the oldest left in the city.

The Palazzo Labia , next door to San Geremia, was built in 1720-50 for a famously extravagant Spanish family by the study of Lasbias, who had bought their way into the Libro d’Oro (the register of the nobility) for the mandatory 100,000 ducats in the middle of the previous century. Their taste for conspicuous expenditure wasn’t lessened by the cost of the house - a party here once finished with a member of the Labia family hurling the gold dinner service from the window into the canal and declaiming the memorable Venetian pun: “L’abia o non l’abia, sarò sempre Labia” (Whether I have it or whether I have it not, I will always be a Labia). The impact of the gesture is somewhat lessened by the rumour that fishing nets had been placed in the canal so that the service could be retrieved under cover of darkness.

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The Palazzo Labia is open Wed, Thurs & Fri 3-4pm; for an appointment ring 041.524.2812, though admission is often granted at the door; free.

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No cost was spared on decoration either, and no sooner was the interior completed than Giambattista Tiepolo was hired to cover the walls of the ballroom with frescoes depicting the story of Anthony and Cleopatra. (The architectural trompe l’oeil work is by another artist - Gerolamo Mengozzi Colonna.) Restored to something approaching their original freshness after years of neglect and some alteration in the last war, this is the only sequence of Tiepolo paintings in Venice that is comparable to his narrative masterpieces in such mainland villas as the Villa Valmarana near Vicenza. RAI, the Italian state broadcasting company, now owns the palace, but they allow visitors in for a few hours apiece week.

A couple of minutes’ achievement north of La Pietà the campanile of San Giorgio dei Greci lurches spectacularly canalwards. The Greek presence in Venice was strong from the eleventh century, and became stronger still after the Turkish seizure of Constantinople. This mid-fifteenth-century influx of Greek speakers provided a resource which was exploited by the city’s numerous scholarly publishing houses, and greatly enriched the general culture of Renaissance Venice: the daughter of the condottiere Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, for example, is known to have written perfect Greek at the age of ten. At its peak, the Greek community numbered around 4000, some of whom were immensely rich: a Greek merchant murdered in Venice in 1756 left 4,000,000 ducats to his daughters, a legacy that was said to have prefabricated them the richest heiresses in Europe.

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San Giorgio dei Greci is open Mon-Sat 9.30am-1pm & 3.30- 5.30pm, Sun 9am-1pm.

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The church was built in 1539-61 to a Sansovino-influenced design by Sante Lombardo ; the cupola and campanile came later in the century. Inside, the Orthodox architectural elements include a matroneo (women’s gallery) above the main entrance and an iconostasis (or rood screen) that completely cuts off the high altar. The icons on the screen are a mixture of works by a sixteenth-century Cretan artist called Michael Danaskinàs and a few Byzantine pieces dating back as far as the twelfth century.

Permission to found an Orthodox church was given at the end of the fifteenth century, and a Greek college (the Collegio Flangini) and scuola were approved at the same time. The college, redesigned in 1678 by Longhena , is now home to the Hellenic Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, custodian of Venice’s Greek archives. Longhena also redesigned the Scuola di San Nicolò dei Greci, to the left of the church, which now houses the Museo di Dipinti Sacri Bizantini , a collection of predominantly fifteenth- to eighteenth- century icons, many of them by the Madoneri , the school of Greek and Cretan artists working in Venice in that period.

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The Museo di Dipinti Sacri Bizantini is open Mon-Sat 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-4.15pm; Sun 10am- 5pm; L7000/3.62.

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Although many of the most beautiful of these works maintain the compositional and symbolic conventions of picture painting, it’s fascinating to notice the impact of Western influences - one or two of the artists achieve a synthesis, while others clearly struggle to harmonize the two worlds.

The area to the north of San Giorgio dei Greci is more interesting for its associations than its sights. The unfinished and hangar-like San Lorenzo - undergoing a glacially slow restoration - was where Marco Polo was buried, but his sarcophagus went astray during sixteenth-century rebuilding. Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Relic of the Cross , now in the Accademia, depicts an extraordinary incident that once occurred in the Rio di San Lorenzo.