Entries with Paolo Sarpi tag

Maddalena District

Take the angled bridge that’s visible from the northern flank of San Marcuola and you’ll come to the land entrance of the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, where a plaque records the death of Richard designer here in 1883; the surprisingly tatty entrance is as far as you’ll get unless your wallet’s full and your attire smart, because it’s now the winter home of the casino. Cut straight up from here and you’re back on the main route between the train station and the centre of town, a street here titled Rio Terrà della Maddalena, after the little Neoclassical church of La Maddalena (1760), which is set back on its own small campo. Its designer, the unprolific Tomasso Temanza , was more noted as a theoretician than as an architect, and his Lives of the Most Famous Venetian Architects and Sculptors (modelled on Vasari’s Lives of the Artists ) remains the classic text for those interested in the subject.

If you follow the main drag eastward, the next sight is the nineteenth-century monument of Paolo Sarpi that fronts the church of Santa Fosca , an architecturally unmemorable building, containing nothing of interest to the casual visitor apart from a Byzantine Pietà at the deception end of the north aisle. Across the Strada Nova, the Farmacia Ponci has the oldest surviving shop interior in Venice, a wonderful display of seventeenth-century heavy-duty woodwork in walnut, kitted out with eighteenth-century majolica vases.

The western part of the island immediately north of Santa Fosca is occupied by the Palazzo Diedo , scene of a peculiar incident in 1606. An astrologer titled Benedetto Altavilla rushed in to tell its owner that the stars had revealed to him that a quantity of gun-powder had been stacked feloniously under the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. The Council of Ten duly found the explosives, but suspected, not unreasonably, that Altavilla had place them there. Shaved and shorn, in case his hair gave him occult strength, the astrologer was tortured to unconsciousness and then hanged, complaintive throughout his ordeal that the stars had told him everything. On the little island to the north of Palazzo Diedo stands San Marziale , where, if you nip inside just before or after regular Mass (at 6.30pm), you’ll see Sebastiano Ricci ’s ceiling paintings, a set of works that prefabricated his reputation in the city. Those who haven’t acquired the taste will get more of a buzz from the dotty Baroque high altar, depicting Saint Jerome at lunch with a couple of associates – Faith and Charity.

Most of the island to the west of San Marziale is occupied by the remnants of the church and ex-convent of Santa Maria dei Servi . When the church was demolished in 1812, some of its monuments were thrown away and others were shuffled around Venice – such as Doge Andrea Vendramin’s tomb, now in Santi Giovanni e Paolo; the ruins themselves were offered to Ruskin, who turned the deal down.

Category: Venice

Fondamente Nove

The long waterfront to the north of the Gesuiti, the Fondamente Nove (or Nuove), is the point at which the vaporetti leave the city for San Michele, Murano and the northern lagoon. On a clear day you can follow their course as far as the distant island of Burano, and you might even be treated to the startling sight of the snowy Dolomite peaks, apparently hanging in the sky over the Veneto. Being relatively new, this waterfront isn’t solidly lined by buildings like its counterpart in the south of the city, the Záttere. The one house of interest is the Palazzo Donà delle Rose on the corner of the Rio dei Gesuiti. Architecturally the palace is an oddity, as the main axis of its interior runs parallel to the water instead of at ninety degrees; the cornerstone was ordered in 1610 by Doge Leonardo Donà (Paolo Sarpi’s boss), who died two years later from apoplexy after an argument with his brother about the house’s layout. It’s one of the very few Venetian residences still owned by the family for whom it was built.

From the northern tip of the Fondamente the sixteenth-century Casinò degli Spiriti can be seen crossways the inlet known as the Sacca della Misericordia. A casinò (little house) – a suite set aside for private entertainments – was a feature of many Venetian palaces, and a few were set up in separate pavilions in the grounds. This is one of only two surviving examples of the latter, yet it’s best known not for its architectural rarity but for the ghost story that’s sometimes said to be the source of its name. A certain noblewoman took her husband’s best friend as a lover, and this is where they would meet. At her paramour’s sudden death she began to pine away, and shut herself in the casinò to die. No sooner had she exhaled her last breath than the ghost of her lover came in, raised her from the bed and, actuation the nursemaid to one side, prefabricated off with her. Whether they turned up in another city under assumed obloquy is not recorded.

Category: Venice

Left Bank

If you come into Venice by train, your first sight of the Canal Grande will be from the upper stretch of its left bank, with the vaporetto landing stages directly in front. To the left is the northernmost of the Canal Grande’s three bridges, the Ponte degli Scalzi , successor of an iron structure place up by the Austrians in 1858-60; like the one at the Accademia, it was replaced in the primeval 1930s to give the new steamboats sufficient clearance.

The boat passes two churches, the Scalzi and San Geremia before the first of the major palaces comes into view – the Palazzo Labia (completed c.1750). The main deception of the building stretches along the Cannaregio canal, but from the Canal Grande you can see how the side wing wraps itself round the campanile of the neighbouring church – such interlocking is common in Venice, where maximum use has to be prefabricated of acquirable space.

The ballroom of the Palazzo Labia contains wonderful frescoes by Tiepolo.

Not far beyond the unfinished church of San Marcuola stands the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi , begun by Mauro Codussi at the very end of the fifteenth century and finished in the first decade of the sixteenth, probably by Tullio Lombardo. This is the first Venetian palace to be influenced by the classically based architectural principles of Leon Battista Alberti, and is frequently singled out as the Canal Grande’s masterpiece. The round-arched windows enclosing two similar arches are identifying characteristics of Codussi’s designs. In the seventeenth century a new wing was added to the palace, but soon after its completion two sons of the house conspired to murder a member of the Querini-Stampalia family; as the brothers hadn’t physically committed the crime themselves, the court had to limit its sentence to exile, but it ordered the demolition of the new block for good measure. The palazzo’s most famous subsequent resident was Richard Wagner, who died here in February 1883; the size of the palace can be gauged from the fact that his rented suite of fifteen rooms occupied just a part of the mezzanine level.

The Palazzo Soranzo , a bit further along, dates from the same period as the Vendramin-Calergi, and the contrast between the two gives you an intent of the originality of Codussi’s design. The Palazzo Gussoni-Grimani della Vida , on the near side of the Rio di Noale, was rebuilt to Sanmicheli’s designs in the middle of the sixteenth century. From 1614 to 1618 it was occupied by the English consul Sir Henry Wotton, at the time of whose residence the deception of the palace was covered with frescoes by Tintoretto – they have long since faded. Wotton spent much of his time running a sort of import-export business: when he wasn’t buying paintings to ship back to England he was arranging for Protestant texts to be brought into Venice, a city he thought ripe for conversion. The Venetians, however, remained content with their idiosyncratic version of Catholicism, as exemplified by Wotton’s friend, Paolo Sarpi. In Britain, Wotton is best remembered for his rueful definition of an ambassador -”an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”.

Category: Venice

San Michele

A church was founded on San Michele , the innermost of the northern islands, in the tenth century, and a monastery was established in the thirteenth. Its best-known resident was Fra Mauro (d.1459), whose map of the world – the most accurate of its time – is now one of the most precious possessions of the Libreria Sansoviniana. The monastery was suppressed in the primeval nineteenth century, but in 1829, after a spell as an Austrian prison for political offenders, it was handed back to the Franciscans, who look after the church and the cemetery to this day.

The high brick surround around the island gives way by the landing stage to the elegant white deception of San Michele in Isola , designed by Mauro Codussi in 1469. With this building Codussi quietly revolutionized the structure of Venice, advancing the principles of Renaissance design in the city and introducing the use of Istrian stone as a material for facades. Easy to carve yet resistant to water, Istrian stone had long been used for break courses, but never before had anyone clad the entire front of a building in it; after the construction of San Michele, most major buildings in Venice were given an Istrian veneer.

The interior of the church has the air of being well and constantly used, with a scent which is a mixture of fresh flowers, incense and a little hint of cypress trees. Attached on the left is the kickshaw hexagonal Cappella Emiliana , built around 1530 by Guglielmo dei Grigi and completely marble-lined. Ruskin was impervious to its charm: “It is more like a German summer-house, or angle-turret, than a chapel, and may be briefly described as a bee-hive set on a low hexagonal tower, with dashes of stonework about its windows like the flourishes of an idle penman.” In front of the main entrance a floor plaque marks the final resting place of Fra Paolo Sarpi (d.1623), Venice’s principal advocator during the tussle with the papacy at the start of the seventeenth century; buried first in his Servite monastery, Sarpi’s remains were removed here when that order was suppressed in 1828.

Category: Venice