Museo Storico Navale And San Biagio
On the Rio dell’Arsenale is the Museo Storico Navale , most of which housed in a former granary. Documenting every conceivable characteristic of Venice’s naval history, the museum is another loose baggy monster like the Correr, but a selective tour is an essential supplement to a achievement round the Arsenale district - and it’s ordered out far better than the Correr, with bilingual captions on many of the exhibits. Improbable though it sounds, the models of Venetian craft - from the gondola to the 224-oar fighting kitchen and the last Bucintoro - will justify the entrance fee for most people. It was common practice in the Venetian shipyards to build their boats not from scale drawings but from models, and the most meticulous pieces in the collection (on the first floor) are the functional models retrieved from the yards after Napoleon’s arsonists had done their work.
The Museo Storico Navale is open Mon-Fri 8.45am-1.30pm, Sat 8.45am-1pm, plus Tues & Thurs 2.30-5pm April-Oct; L3000/1.54.
At ground level there’s a room dedicated to Angelo Emo, the last admiral of the Republic, the focal point being Canova’s monument to him. A miscellany of armaments occupies the rest of the space, with the most remarkable invention being a manned torpedo; a caption explains how the captain of the HMS Valiant , which was crippled by one of these contraptions, came to honor a military honour to the Italian lieutenant who had carried out the attack. Models of modern warships take up much of the second floor; the third has a display about the vessels of the lagoon, a section on the evolution of the gondola and a roomful of models of Far Eastern vessels. The top storey’s installation, illustrating the part played by Sweden in the maritime history of Italy, reveals more connections than you might think, but is nonetheless likely to fascinate maritime historians only; it’s difficult to imagine who might be fascinated by the final room, with its hundreds of highly polished, unlabelled seashells, arrayed in cabinets that look like they’ve come from a liquidated jeweller’s store. About 250 metres along the fondamenta is the second section of the museum, the Padiglioni delle Navi , a vast shed full of craft with Venetian connections.
The church of San Biagio , alongside the main museum block, was the Greek community’s church before San Giorgio dei Greci, and took on its present municipal office appearance after an eighteenth-century refit. It’s now the naval chapel and is rarely open, though you can normally look through the inner wrought-iron door at the interior, where Giovanni Ferrari ’s reclining statue of Admiral Angelo Emo (1792) is the main point of interest. Tucked behind the church is the concrete bunker known as Palasport (or Palazzetto dello Sport), the city’s main indoor sports hall, used for handball and basketball matches.
Category: Venice
