Entries with Cyprus tag

Campanile And The Clock Tower

The Campanile began life as a combined lighthouse and belltower in the primeval tenth century, when what’s now the Piazzetta was the city’s harbour. Modifications were prefabricated continually up to 1515, the year in which Bartolomeo Bon the Younger’s rebuilding was rounded off with the positioning of a golden angel on the summit. Each of its five bells had a distinct function: the Marangona , the largest, tolled the beginning and end of the working day; the Trottiera was a signal for members of the Maggior Consiglio to hurry to the council chamber; the Nona rang midday; the Mezza Terza announced a session of the Senate; and the smallest, the Renghiera or Maleficio , gave notice of an execution.

The Campanile is open regular 9am-7pm; L8000/4.16.

The Campanile played another part in the Venetian penal system -”persons of scandalous behaviour” ran the risk of being subjected to the Supplizio della Cheba (Torture of the Cage), which involved being stuck in a crate which was then hoisted up the south grappling of the tower; if you were lucky you’d get away with a few days swinging in the breeze, but in some cases the view from the Campanile was the last thing the sinner saw. A more cheerful diversion was provided by the Volo dell’Anzolo (or del Turco – Flight of the Angel or Turk), a stunt which used to be performed apiece year at the end of the Carnevale, in which an intrepid volunteer from the Arsenale would slide on a rope from the top of the Campanile to the first-floor loggia of the Palazzo Ducale, there to present a bouquet to the doge.

But the Campanile’s most dramatic contribution to the history of the city was prefabricated on July 14, 1902, the day on which, at 9.52am, the tower succumbed to the weaknesses caused by recent structural changes, and fell down. (At some postcard stalls you can buy faked photos of the very instant of disaster.) The collapse was anticipated and the area cleared, so there were no human casualties; the only life lost was that of an incautious cat called Mélampyge (named after Casanova’s dog). What’s more, the bricks fell so neatly that San Marco was barely scratched and the Libreria lost just its end wall. The town councillors decided that evening that the Campanile should be rebuilt “dov’era e com’era” (where it was and how it was), and a decade later, on St Mark’s Day 1912, the new tower was opened, in all but minor details a replica of the original.

At 99m, the Campanile is the tallest structure in the city, and from the top you can make out virtually every building, but not a single canal – which is almost as surprising as the view of the Dolomites, which on clear days seem to be in Venice’s back yard. Among the many who have marvelled at the panorama are Galileo, who demonstrated his telescope from here; Goethe, who had never before seen the sea; and the Emperor Frederick III, whose climb to the top was achieved with a certain panache – he rode his horse up the tower’s internal ramp. The ready access granted to the tourist is a modern privilege: the Venetian state used to permit foreigners to ascend only at high tide, when they would be unable to see the elusive channels through the lagoon, which were crucial to the city’s defence.

The collapse of the Campanile of course pulverized the Loggetta at its base, but somehow it was pieced together again, mainly using material retrieved from the wreckage. Sansovino ’s design was for a building that would completely enclose the foot of the Campanile, but only one quarter of the plan was executed (in 1537-49). Intended as a meeting place for the city’s nobility, it was soon converted into a guardhouse for the Arsenalotti (workers from the Arsenale) who patrolled the area when the Maggior Consiglio was sitting, and in the last years of the Republic served as the room in which the state lottery was drawn. The bronze figures in niches are also by Sansovino (Pallas, Apollo, Mercury and Peace), as is the terracotta group inside (although the figure of St John is a modern facsimile); the three marble reliefs on the attic are, as ever, allegories of the power and beneficence of the Serenissima (the Most Serene Republic): Justice = Venice, Jupiter = Crete, Venus = Cyprus.

Category: Venice

Right Bank

Arriving in Venice by road, you come in on the right bank of the Canal Grande at Piazzale Roma, opposite the train station. Orientation is initially difficult, with canals heading off in various directions and no immediate landmark; it’s not until the vaporetto swings round by the train station that it becomes obvious that this is the city’s main waterway.

Having passed the green-domed church of San Simeone Piccolo , the end of the elongated campo of San Simeone Grande and a procession of nondescript buildings, you come to the Fondaco dei Turchi (opposite San Marcuola). A private house from the primeval thirteenth century until 1621 (including spells when it was used as a guesthouse for VIPs), the building was then turned over to the Turkish traders in the city, who stayed here until 1838. By the 1850s it was in such a terrible state that a campaign for its restoration was started, with Ruskin at the helm; the city undertook the repair, but the result was judged nearly as bad an eyesore as the ruin had been, and has had few admirers since. There’s hardly an original brick left in the building, but whatever the shortcomings of the work, the building’s towers and long water-level arcade give a reasonably precise, if schematic, picture of what a Veneto-Byzantine palace would have looked like. One of the sarcophagi underneath the portico belongs to the family of the disgraced Marin Falier. The Fondaco housed the Correr collection from 1880 to 1922, and now contains the natural history museum.

The crenellated structure next along from the Fondaco is the fifteenth-century Depositi del Megio (public granary); its neighbour is another palace by Longhena – the Palazzo Belloni-Battagia (1647-63). Longhena’s client experienced severe cash-flow problems not long after the house was finished, a consequence of simultaneously building the house and buying his way into the pages of the Libro d’Oro (the register of the nobility), and so was obligated to rent the place out rather than live in it himself.

A short distance down the canal, after the church of San Stae , stands a far more impressive Longhena building – the thickly ornamented Ca’ Pésaro , bristling with diamond-shaped spikes and grotesque heads. Three houses had to be demolished to make room for this palace and its construction lasted half a century – work started in 1652 and finished in 1703, long after Longhena’s death. Unusually, the Ca’ Pésaro has a stone-clad side facade: most houses in Venice have plain brick sides, either because of the cost of stone, or because of the possibility that a later building might be attached.

The Ca’ Pésaro contains the Galleria d’Arte Moderna and the Museo Orientale.

The next large building is the Palazzo Corner della Regina , built in 1724 on the site of the home of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, from whom the palace takes its name. The base of the Biennale archives, it was formerly the Monte di Pietà (municipal pawnshop).

Beyond, there’s nothing especially engrossing until you reach the Rialto markets , which begin with the neo-Gothic fish market, the Pescheria , built in 1907; there’s been a fish market here since the fourteenth century. The older buildings that follow it, the Fabbriche Nuove di Rialto and (set back from the water) the Fabbriche Vecchie di Rialto , are by Sansovino (c.1550) and Scarpagnino (c.1520) respectively.

The large building at the base of the Rialto bridge is the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi (c.1525), the former chambers of the Venetian exchequer. Debtors could find themselves in the cells of the building’s bottom storey – hence the study Fondamenta delle Prigioni for this part of the canalside. At the foot of the Rialto bridge, on the other side, were the offices of the state finance ministers, in Scarpagnino’s Palazzo dei Dieci Savi .

Category: Venice

About Venice

Nobody arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time. Depicted and described so often that its image has become part of the European collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should. The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the brochure photographs prefabricated them out to be, Piazza San Marco does indeed look as perfect as a film set, and the panorama crossways the water from the Palazzo Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted it. The sense of familiarity soon fades, however, as details of the scene begin to catch the attention – an ancient carving high on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred round an impossible corner, a tiny shop in a dilapidated building, a waterlogged basement. And the longer one looks, the stranger and more intriguing Venice becomes.Founded fifteen hundred years ago on a cluster of mudflats in the centre of the lagoon, Venice rose to become Europe’s main trading post between the West and the East, and at its height controlled an empire that spread north to the Dolomites and over the sea as far as Cyprus. As its wealth increased and its population grew, the artifact of the city grew ever more dense. Very few parts of the hundred or so islets that compose the historic centre are not built up, and very few of its closely knit streets bear no sign of the city’s long lineage. Even in the most insignificant alleyway you might find fragments of a medieval building embedded in the surround of a house like fossil remains lodged in a cliff face.

The melancholic air of the place is in part a product of the discrepancy between the grandeur of its history and what the city has become. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, some 200,000 people lived in Venice, not far short of three times its present population. Merchants from Germany, Greece, Turkey and a host of other countries maintained warehouses here; transactions in the banks and bazaars of the Rialto dictated the value of commodities all over the continent; in the dockyards of the Arsenale the workforce was so vast that a warship could be built and fitted out in a single day; and the Piazza San Marco was perpetually thronged with people here to set up business deals or report to the Republic’s government. Nowadays it’s no longer a living metropolis but rather the embodiment of a mythologic past, dependent for its survival largely on the people who come to marvel at its relics.

The monuments which draw the largest crowds are the Basilica di San Marco – the mausoleum of the city’s patron fear – and the Palazzo Ducale – the home of the doge and all the governing councils. Certainly these are the most dramatic structures in the city: the first a mosaic-clad emblem of Venice’s Byzantine origins, the second perhaps the finest of all secular Gothic buildings. Every parish rewards exploration, though – a roll-call of the churches worth visiting would feature over fifty names, and a list of the important paintings and sculptures they contain would be twice as long. Two of the distinctively Venetian institutions known as the Scuole retain some of the outstanding examples of Italian Renaissance art – the Scuola di San Rocco , with its dozens of pictures by Tintoretto, and the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni , decorated with a gorgeous sequence by Carpaccio.

Although many of the city’s treasures remain in the buildings for which they were created, a sizeable number have been removed to one or other of Venice’s museums. The one that should not be missed is the Accademia , an assembly of Venetian painting that consists of virtually nothing but masterpieces; other prominent collections include the museum of eighteenth-century art in the Ca’ Rezzonico and the Museo Correr , the civic museum of Venice – but again, a comprehensive list would fill a page.

Then, of course, there’s the inexhaustible spectacle of the streets themselves, of the majestic and sometimes decrepit palaces, of the hemmed-in squares where much of the social life of the city is conducted, of the sunlit courtyards that suddenly open up at the end of an unpromising passageway. The cultural heritage preserved in the museums and churches is a source of endless fascination, but you should discard your itineraries for a day and just wander – the anonymous parts of Venice reveal as much of the city’s essence as the highlighted attractions. Equally indispensible for a full understanding of Venice’s way of life and development are expeditions to the northern and southern islands of the lagoon, where the incursions of the tourist industry are on the whole less obtrusive.

Venice’s hinterland – the Veneto – is historically and economically one of Italy’s most important regions. Its major cities – Padua , Vicenza and Verona – are all covered in the guide, along with many of the smaller towns located between the lagune and the mountains to the north. Although rock-bottom hotel prices are rare in the affluent Veneto, the cost of accommodation on the mainland is appreciably lower than in Venice itself, and to get the most out of the less accessible sights of the Veneto it’s definitely necessary to base yourself for a day or two somewhere other than Venice – perhaps in the northern town of Belluno or in the more central Castelfranco.

The City

The historic centre of Venice is prefabricated up of 118 islands, most of which began life as a micro-community, apiece with a parish church or two, and a square for public meetings. Though many Venetians maintain a strong attachment to their particular part of the city, the autonomy of these parishes has been eroded since the days when traffic between them moved by water. Some 400 bridges now tie the islands together, forming an amalgamation that’s divided into six large administrative districts known as sestieri, three on apiece side of the Canal Grande.

The sestiere of San Marco is the regularize where the majority of the essential sights are clustered, and is accordingly the most expensive and most crowded district of the city. On the easterly it’s bordered by Castello , and on the north by Cannaregio – both of which become more residential, and poorer and quieter, the further you go from San Marco. On the other bank the largest of the sestieri is Dorsoduro , which stretches from the fashionable quarter at the tip of the Canal Grande, south of the Accademia gallery, to the docks in the west. Santa Croce , titled after a now demolished church, roughly follows the curve of the Canal Grande from Piazzale Roma to a point just short of the Rialto, where it joins the commercially most active of the districts on this bank – San Polo .

To the uninitiated, the boundaries of the sestieri can seem utterly perplexing, and they are of little use as a means of structuring a guide. So, although in most instances this guide uses the study of a sestiere to indicate broadly which regularize of the city we’re in, the boundaries of our sections have been chosen for their practicality and do not, except in the case of San Marco, follow the city’s official divisions. Most of the sestiere of Santa Croce, for example, is covered in the San Polo section, with the remnant covered in Dorsoduro, as the sestiere has no focal point for the visitor and very few sights

Category: Venice