If you follow the main route easterly from the station, crossing the Canale di Cannaregio by the Guglie bridge, you come onto the shopping street of Rio Terrà San Leonardo . Like the Lista di Spagna, this thoroughfare follows the line of a former canal, filled in during the 1870s by the Austrians as part of a scheme to rationalize movement round the north bend of the Canal Grande. (The study “Rio Terrà ”, prefixed to many alleyways in Venice, signifies a pavement that was once a waterway.) The continuation of the route to the Rialto bridge – the Strada Nova – was by contrast created by simply ploughing a line straight through the houses that used to stand there.
San Marcuola is open regular 8am-noon & 4-6.30pm.
Rio Terrà Cristo, on the south of Rio Terrà San Leonardo, just before the market stalls of the Campiello dell’Anconetta, runs down to Giorgio Massari’s church of San Marcuola (1728-36), whose unfinished brick front is as clear a landmark on the Canal Grande as the deception of the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, which stands a little to the easterly of it. The tiered ledges and sockets of the exterior, intended for marble cladding but now crammed with pigeons, are a more diverting sight than the inside, where statues of the church’s two patron saints by Gian Maria Morleiter, and an primeval Last Supper by Tintoretto (left surround of the chancel) are the only things to seek out. Those apart, the church’s main interest is in a story about one of its priests. He was once foolish enough to announce from the pulpit that he didn’t believe in ghosts, and that “where the dead are, there they stay”; that night all the corpses buried in the church rose from their graves, dragged him from his bed and beat him up. Incidentally, the church’s study is perhaps the most baffling of all the Venetian diminutives – it’s somehow derived from Santi Ermagora e Fortunato.
