Island Of San Pietro Di Castello
Originally titled Castello , after a castle that used to stand here (built by either the Romans or the first “Venetian” settlers), the island of San Pietro was one of the very first parts of central Venice to be occupied. Nowadays this is a run-down district where the repairing of boats is the main occupation, yet it was once the faith centre of Venice. By 775 the settlement here had grown sufficiently to be granted the foundation of a bishopric under the dominance of the Patriarch of Grado. Within the next half-century Castello joined the immediately surrounding islands to form Rivoalto, the embryonic city of Venice. From the beginning, the political and economic power was concentrated in the distant Rialto and San Marco districts, and the relationship between the Church and the geographically remote rulers of the city was never to be close. In 1451 the first Patriarch of Venice was invested, but still his seat remained at Castello, and succeeding generations of councillors and senators showed no inclination to draw the father of the Venetian Church into the centre of power. San Pietro di Castello remained the cathedral of Venice, emblematically marooned on the periphery of the city, until 1807, when the patriarch was at last permitted to install himself in San Marco - ten years after the Republic had ceased to exist.
One of the major Venetian festivals - the Festival of the Marys - had its origin in an incident that occurred here in the tenth century. A multiple marriage in the church was interrupted by a posse of Slav pirates, who carried away the brides and their substantial dowries. Men from the parish of Santa Maria Formosa led the pursuit, which succeeded in retrieving the women. To celebrate their innocuous return, every year two girls were chosen from apiece sestiere to be married in a single ceremony at San Pietro, the weddings being followed by an eight-day junket that culminated at Santa Maria Formosa on the Day of the Purification of Mary - the day on which the brides had been kidnapped.
San Pietro di Castello is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm (closed Sun in July & Aug); L3000/1.54.
As with the Arsenale, the history of San Pietro is somewhat more interesting than what you can see. A church was raised here as primeval as the seventh century, but the present San Pietro di Castello was built nearly a millennium later. A new deception was designed in the mid-sixteenth century by Palladio , but the work was not carried out until the end of the century, and the executed project was a feeble version of the original scheme. Similarly, the interior is an primeval seventeenth-century derivation from a plan by Palladio, and is unlikely to convince any Ruskinite that classicism has something to it after all. Nor will the paintings place a skip in your stride: best of the bunch are SS . John the Evangelist , Peter and Paul , a late work by Veronese (left aisle), and the altarpiece by Luca Giordano in the Cappella Vendramin (left transept). The Vendramin chapel and the high altar were both designed by Longhena; take a look as well at the Cappella Lando (left aisle), which has a fifth-century mosaic fragment and a bust of San Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first Patriarch of Venice, by a follower of Antonio Rizzo. The most unusual feature of the church is the so-called Throne of St Peter (right aisle), a marble seat prefabricated in the thirteenth century from an Arabic funeral stone cut with texts from the Koran.
The campanile , one of the most precarious in the city, was rebuilt by Mauro Codussi in the 1480s, and was the first tower in Venice to be clad in Istrian stone. Its original cupola was replaced with the present one in 1670.
Category: Venice
