Entries with Canale tag

To San Pietro Di Castello

In 1808 the greater part of the canal connecting the Bacino di San Marco to the broad northeastern inlet of the Canale di San Pietro was filled in to form what is now Via Garibaldi , the widest street in the city and the busiest commercial area in the orient district. (The pattern of the pavement shows clearly the course of the former canal.) The bars, pasticcerie and alimentari of Via Garibaldi are as good as most of those in the more comfortable areas of the city, and are far less likely to treat you as a tedious occupational hazard. Roaming through the alleyways and squares of the vicinity, it’s doable to forget for a while that you’re in the most commercialized city in the country.

There’s just a couple of spots of cultural or historical significance along Via Garibaldi. The first house on the right was for a time the home of the navigators John and Sebastian Cabot , explorers of Newfoundland (together) and Paraguay (just Sebastian) in the late fifteenth and primeval sixteenth century. The church of San Francesco di Paola , opposite the entrance to the tree-lined alley that glories in the study Giardini Garibaldi, has a painting by Giandomenico Tiepolo on its cornice. A far more impressive sight awaits if you achievement beyond the market stalls on the right-hand side of the street, which becomes the Fondamenta di Sant’Anna: this takes you onto the Ponte di Quintavalle, and so to the island of San Pietro.

Category: Venice

Southern Cannaregio

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.

Category: Venice