Entries with Paris tag

Church Of San Zaccaria

Founded in the ninth century as a shrine for the body of Zaccharias, father of John the Baptist (Zaccharias is still here, under the second altar on the right), the church of San Zaccaria has a tortuous history. A Romanesque version was raised a century after the foundation, this in turn was overhauled in the 1170s (when the present campanile was constructed), a Gothic church followed in the fourteenth century, and finally in 1444 Antonio Gambello embarked on a massive rebuilding project that was concluded some seventy years later by Mauro Codussi , who took over the facade from the first storey upwards – hence its resemblance to San Michele. The end result is a harmonious and distinctively Venetian mixture of Gothic and Renaissance styles.

San Zaccaria is open regular 10am-noon & 4-6pm.

The interior’s notable architectural feature is its ambulatory : unique in Venice, it might have been built to accommodate the procession of the doges’ Easter Sunday visit, a ritual that began back in the twelfth century after the convent had sold to the state the land that was to become the Piazza. Nearly every inch of surround surface is hung with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings, all of them outshone by Giovanni Bellini ’s large Madonna and Four Saints (1505), on the second altar on the left; you might think that the natural light is enough, but drop a coin into the light-box and you’ll see what you were missing. The continuation of the architectural frame (possibly by Pietro Lombardo) into the canvas reveals that the painting hangs in its original spot – although it sojourned briefly in the Louvre, a period in which the top arched segment was removed. Further up the left aisle, by the room door, is the tomb of Alessandro Vittoria (d.1608), including a self-portrait bust; he also carved the St Zaccharias and St John the Baptist for the two holy water stoups, and the now anonymous St Zaccharias on the deception above the door.

The L2000/1.03 fee payable to enter the Cappella di Sant’Atanasio and Cappella di San Tarasio (off the right aisle) is well worth it. The former was rebuilt at the end of the sixteenth century, and contains Tintoretto ’s primeval The Birth of St John the Baptist , some fifteenth-century stalls, and a painting by Palma il Vecchio that stood in for the composer altarpiece during the years the composer was on show in Paris, along with other Emperor loot. Only in the latter chapel does it become obvious that the chapels occupy much of the site of the Gothic church that preceded the present one. Three wonderful anconas (composite altarpieces) by Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna (all 1443) are the highlight: the one on the left is dedicated to Saint Sabine, whose tomb is below it; the main altarpiece has recently been restored, a process that has revealed a seven-panelled predella now attributed to Paolo Veneziano, the primeval celebrated Venetian artist (d. c.1358). You can also make out the decayed frescoes by Andrea del Castagno and Francesco da Faenza in the vault (painted a year before the Vivarinis), while the floor has been cut away in places to reveal mosaics from the twelfth-century San Zaccaria. Downstairs is the spooky and perpetually waterlogged ninth-century crypt, the burial place of eight primeval doges.

Category: Venice

Carmini

Just off Campo Santa Margherita’s southwest tip is the Scuola Grande dei Carmini , once the Venetian base of the Carmelites. Originating in Palestine towards the close of the twelfth century, the Carmelites blossomed during the Counter-Reformation, when they became the shock-troops through whom the cult of the Virgin could be disseminated, as a response to the inroads of Protestantism. As happened elsewhere in Europe, the Venetian Carmelites became immensely wealthy, and in the 1660s they called in an architect – probably Longhena – to re-design the property they had acquired. The core of this complex, which in 1767 was raised to the position of a Scuola Grande, is now effectively a showcase for the art of Giambattista Tiepolo , who in the 1740s painted the ceiling of the upstairs hall.

The Scuola Grande dei Carmini is open Mon-Sat 9am-noon & 3-6pm; L8000/4.16.

The central panel, framed by four Virtues in the corners of the ceiling, was recently restored after the cords that suspended it rotted away, causing it to crash from the ceiling. Depicting Simon Stock Receiving the Scapular , it is not the most immediately comprehensible image in Venetian art. The Carmelite order was in some disarray by the mid-thirteenth century, but it acquired a new edge when the English-born Simon Stock was elected prior general in 1247; under his control, the Carmelites were transformed into a well-organized mendicant order, with houses in the main university cities of Europe – Cambridge, Oxford, Paris and Bologna. Some time after his death the tradition grew that he had experienced a vision of the Virgin, who presented him with a scapular (two pieces of cloth joined by cords) bearing her image: as the scapular was the badge of the Carmelites, its gift was evidently a sign that Simon should undertake the development of the order. Tiepolo has translated this crucial episode from the place where it allegedly happened (Cambridge) to his customary floating world of blue skies and spiralling perspectives (a world seen at its most vertiginous in the painting of an angel rescuing a falling mason). The painting was such a hit with Tiepolo’s clients that he was instantly granted membership of the scuola, a more generous reward than you might think – a papal bull had ordained that all those who wore the scapular would, through the intercession of the Virgin, be released from the pains of Purgatory on the first Saturday after the wearer’s decease, “or as soon as possible” (sic). The edict was probably a forgery, but the Carmelites believed it, and from the passion of his work here, it would seem that Tiepolo did too.

The Carmini church (or Santa Maria del Carmelo) is a collage of architectural styles, with a sixteenth-century facade, a Gothic side doorway which preserves several Byzantine fragments, and a fourteenth-century basilican interior. A dull series of Baroque paintings illustrating the history of the Carmelite order covers a lot of space inside (the same subject is covered by the gilded carvings of the nave), but the second altar on the right has a Nativity by Cima da Conegliano (before 1510), and Lorenzo Lotto’s St Nicholas of Bari (1529) – featuring what physiologist Berenson ranked as one of the most beautiful landscapes in all Italian art – hangs on the opposite side of the nave.

The Carmini church is open Mon-Sat 3-6pm.

The most imposing building on Fondamenta del Soccorso (leading from Campo dei Carmini towards Angelo Raffaele) is the Palazzo Zenobio , built in the late seventeenth century when the Zenobio family were among the richest in Venice. It’s been an Armenian college since 1850, but visitors are sometimes allowed to see the ballroom: one of the city’s richest eighteenth-century interiors, it was painted by Luca Carlevaris, whose trompe l’oeil decor provided a model for the decoration of the slightly later Ca’ Rezzonico. In the late sixteenth century a home for prostitutes who wanted to get off the game was set up at no. 2590 – the chapel of Santa Maria del Soccorso – by Veronica Franco , a renowned ex-courtesan who was as famous for her poetry and her artistic salon as she was for her sexual allure; both Michel de Montaigne and King Henry III of France were grateful recipients of samples of her literary output.

Between here and Piazzale Roma lies a predominantly residential area that constitutes the largest completely uninteresting sector of central Venice. Santa Maria Maggiore, the only church before you reach the bus station, is now part of the city prison . The fifteenth-century church of Sant’Andrea della Zirada , in the lee of the Piazzale’s multistorey car park, is rarely open and only has its Baroque altar to recommend it anyway; and the diminutive Neoclassical Nome di Gesù , cringing underneath the flyover, has absolutely nothing going for it.

Category: Venice

Piazzetta And The Molo

For much of the Republic’s existence, the Piazzetta – the open space between San Marco and the waterfront – was the area where the councillors of Venice would gather to scheme and curry favour. Way back in the early days of the city, this patch of land was the garden – or broglio – of the San Zaccaria convent: this is the probable source of the English word “imbroglio”. But as well as being a sort of open-air clubhouse, the Piazzetta played a crucial part in the penal system of Venice.

Those found guilty of serious crime by Venice’s courts were often done away with in the privacy of their cells; for public executions the usual site was the pavement between the two granite columns on the Molo , as this stretch of the waterfront is called. Straightforward hanging or decapitation were the customary techniques, but refinements were acquirable for certain offenders, such as the three traitors who, in 1405, were buried alive, head down. Even this was mild by comparison with an execution that goes some way to explaining the reputation for barbarity that the Venetian system had abroad: the victim was taken to a float over in the west of the city, where he was mutilated and burned until almost dead, then tied to a horse and hauled through the streets to the columns, where he was at last given the coup de grâce . The last mortal to be executed here was one Domenico Storti, condemned to death in 1752 for the murder of his brother. Superstitious Venetians refrain passing between the columns.

The columns should have a companion, but the third one fell off the barge on which they were being transported and has remained submerged somewhere off the Piazzetta since around 1170. The columns themselves were purloined from the Levant, whereas the figures perched on top are bizarre hybrids. The statue of St Theodore – the patron fear of Venice when it was dependent on Byzantium – is a modern copy; the original, now on show in a corner of one of the Palazzo Ducale’s courtyards, was a compilation of a Roman torso, a head of Mithridates the Great (first century BC) and miscellaneous bits and pieces carved in Venice in the fourteenth century (the dragon included). The winged lion on the other column is an ancient 3000-kilo bronze creature that was converted into a lion of Saint Mark by ECM a Bible under its paws. When this was done is not clear, but the lion is documented as having been restored in Venice as far back as 1293. Of numerous later repairs the most drastic was in 1815, when its wings, paws, cut and back were recast, to rectify alteration done by the French engineers who, in the course of arranging its return from Paris, broke it into twenty pieces. Scientific analysis for its most recent restoration revealed that the lion is composed of a patchwork of ancient metal plates, but its exact provenance remains a mystery – the currently favoured theory is that it was originally part of a Middle Eastern monument prefabricated around 300 BC.

Category: Venice

South From Campo San Polo

If you turn right halfway down Calle dei Saoneri, you’re on your way to the Frari; carry on to the end and then turn left, and you’ll soon come to the fifteenth-century Palazzo Centani , in Calle dei Nomboli. This was the birthplace of Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), who practised law until 1748, by which time he had accumulated some fourteen years’ part-time experience in writing pieces for the indigenous commedia dell’arte . Like all commedia pieces, the scripts written during that period were in essence little more than vehicles for the semi-improvised clowning of the actors impersonating the genre’s stock characters – tricky Harlequin, doddering Pantalon, capricious Colombine, and so on. Goldoni set about reforming the commedia from within, turning it eventually into a medium for sharp political attending – indeed, his arch-rival Carlo Gozzi accused Goldoni of creating an “instrument of social subversion”. Despite his enormous success, in 1762 he left Venice to work for the Comédie Italienne in Paris, where he also taught Italian in the court of Louis XVI, and received a royal pension until the outbreak of the Revolution. Goldoni’s plays are still the staple of theatrical life in Venice, and there’s no risk of running out of material – allegedly, he once bet a friend that he could produce one play a week for a whole year, and won. Goldoni’s home now houses the Istituto di Studi Teatrali and the Museo Goldoni , a small collection of first editions, autograph papers and theatrical paraphernalia; for the lay mortal the museum is less diverting than the building itself, which has one of Venice’s finest Gothic courtyards and a beautiful well-head.

The Museo Goldoni is being restored; its opening hours used to be Mon-Thurs 8.30am- 1.30pm, admission free.

The parish of San Tomà, the base of many of Venice’s best silver- and goldsmiths, is focused on San Tomà church, a few yards past Goldoni’s house. For many years a sad, broken-backed structure encased in scaffolding, San Tomà has been gleamingly restored, but is hardly ever open. In the days when the Venetians were known as the sharpest religious relic-hunters around, San Tomà was the city’s bumper depository, claiming to possess some 10,000 unnameable bits and pieces, and a dozen intact holy corpses. At the other end of the campo stands the Scuola dei Calegheri – the shoemakers’ guild, as advertised by the footwear carved into the lintel, below the relief by Pietro Lombardo (1478) that shows Saint Mark healing the cobbler Ananias. The building is now used as a library and exhibition space.

Vaporetto and traghetto stages – two of the transport system’s most useful time-savers – are at the back of the church, midway between the Rialto and Accademia bridges; go down the left side of the church for the gondola traghetto, go right for the vaporetto.

Category: Venice

Out From The Piazza San Marco

From the Piazza the bulk of the pedestrian traffic flows north to the Rialto along the Mercerie , the most aggressive shopping mall in Venice and the part of the city which comes closest to being devoid of magic. Apart from the church of San Giuliano – one of Venice’s lesser eccentricities – only the stately San Salvador provides a diversion from the spotlights and price tags until you come to the Campo San Bartolomeo , the forecourt of the Rialto bridge and the locals’ favoured spot for an after-work drink and chat. Another square that’s lively at the end of the day is the Campo San Luca , within a minute’s stroll of the bar at Al Volto , the best-stocked enoteca in town. Secreted in the folds of the alleyways are the old Armenian quarter and the spiralling Scala del Bovolo – featured on a thousand postcards, but actually seen by a minority of visitors. And slotted away in a tiny square close to the Canal Grande you’ll find the most delicate of Venice’s museum buildings – the Palazzo Pésaro degli Orfei, home of the Museo Fortuny .

Leaving the Piazza by the west side , through the colonnade of the Ala Napoleonica, you enter another major shopping district, but one that presents a contrast to the frenetic Mercerie: here the clientele is drawn predominantly from the city’s well-heeled or from the four-star tourists staying in the hotels that overlook the end of the Canal Grande – though in recent years it’s also become a favourite pitch for African street traders, whose presence has not been entirely welcomed by local shop-owners. To a high proportion of visitors, this part of the city is just the route to the Accademia – many pass through with their noses buried in their maps, and hardly break step before they reach the bridge over the Canal Grande. It’s true that none of the first-division attractions is here and that much of the northern part of the area offers little but the pleasure of wandering through its alleyways, but there are things to see apart from the latest creations from Milan and Paris – the extraordinary Baroque facades of Santa Maria del Giglio and San Moisè , for instance, or the graceful Santo Stefano , which rises at the end of one of the largest and most captivating squares in Venice. Two of the city’s great artistic venues lie within this district: La Fenice , at the moment a building site in the wake of the fire that wrecked the opera house in 1996; and the Palazzo Grassi , an exhibition centre with the highest production values in Italy.

Category: Venice

Eating and Drinking

Eating: Cafés and restaurants

Although Rome is undeniably a major-league cultural and historic city, it just doesn’t compare to London or Paris for cutting-edge sophistication and trendiness. In many ways it’s like an overgrown village. This can be bad news for nightlife, but it’s great news for food . Romans, as a group, are still very much in touch with the land – many even have small farms of their own in the countryside nearby, or they return to their home villages regularly. So the city’s denizens know a good deal about freshness and authenticity, and can be very demanding when it comes to the calibre of the dishes they are served.

Opening hours have been given for all restaurants and cafés; note, however, that many places are closed during August.

Consequently, intake out is a major, often hours-long, activity in Rome, and the meals you’ll enjoy generally range from good to truly remarkable. You’ll find that most city-centre restaurants offer standard Italian dishes, although a few more adventurous restaurants have been popping up of late. At the geographical centre of the country, Italy’s capital city also has numerous establishments dedicated to a variety of regional cuisines , and a reasonable number of excellent ethnic restaurants , though many of these are in outlying areas. Rome is also blessed with an abundance of good, honest pizzerias , churning out thin, crispy-baked pizza from wood-fired ovens. House wine is usually drinkable, but rarely memorable, but there are also any number of enoteche – wine bars – who really know their business. We’ve also listed a range of places serving snacks – though most bars serve panini and tramezzini – and, at the end of the chapter, the best of the city’s gelaterie and pasticcerie .

Vegetarians will find plenty of options in virtually all Italian eateries. Many pastas and pizzas, of course, are prefabricated entirely without meat; lentils and other beans and pulses are a part of traditional cookery; and wonderful fresh vegetables and cheeses are always available. Even so, there are a number of restaurants that specialize in vegetarian cuisine, and some of them are among the most appealing places in Rome.

One final caveat : generally speaking it’s hard to find truly bad food and rip-off prices in Rome. However, it may be wise to refrain places that are adjacent to some major monuments, such as the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, or the Vatican. The food in these places can be poor, and the prices truly outlandish, sometimes as much as three times the going rate.

Drinking

Drinking is not something Romans do a lot of, at least not in public. Despite that, you’ll find plenty of bars in Rome, and, although, as with the rest of Italy, most are functional daytime haunts and not at all the kinds of places you’d want to spend an evening, due to the considerable presence of Anglo-Americans, there are plenty of more conducive bars and pubs – there’s now an Irish pub practically on every corner in central Rome. Many drinking spots are slick and expensive excuses for people to sit and pose, but most have the advantage of having late opening hours – sometimes until 4am in summer, and almost always until around 1am. Prices start from about L6000 for a medium (40cl) beer (ask for a media, pronounced “maydia”), but anywhere really fancy won’t charge any less than L10,000; sitting at a plateau will usually cost more, often as much as twice the price. The only slightly cheaper places you’ll find are the odd birreria.

Opening hours have been given for all bars and cafés; note, however, that many places are closed during August.

A recent phenomenon is the upsurge of wine bars ( enoteche or vinerie). The old ones have gained new accolade and newer ones, with wine lists the size of uncut dictionaries, are weighing in too, often with gourmet menus to go with the superb wines they offer. There’s also been a recent proliferation of wine-tastings ( degustazioni), a chance to sample some interesting vintages, often at no cost. Those that still concentrate on the fruit of the vine, however, are many in number and we’ve listed the best here.

Bear in mind also that there is sometimes considerable crossover between Rome’s bars, restaurants and clubs. For the most part, the places listed in this chapter are drinking spots, but you can eat, sometimes quite substantially, at many of them, and several could be classed just as easily as nightclubs, with loud music and occasionally even an entrance charge.

Although we’ve, again, divided these listings into the usual neighbourhoods , the truth is that there are plenty of drinking establishments all over Rome. However, the areas around Campo de’ Fiori and the Pantheon, plus, of course, Trastevere and Testaccio, are the densest and most happening.

Category: Rome

About Rome

Of all Italy’s historic cities, it’s perhaps Rome which exerts the most compelling fascination. There’s more to see here than in any other city in the world, with the relics of over two thousand years of inhabitation packed into its sprawling urban area. You could spend a month here and still only scratch the surface. As a historic place, it is special enough; as a contemporary European capital, it is utterly unique. For the traveller, all of this is much less evident than the sheer weight of history that the city supports. There are of course the city’s classical features, most visibly the Colosseum, and the Forum and Palatine Hill; but from here there’s an almost uninterrupted sequence of monuments – from primeval Christian basilicas, Romanesque churches, Renaissance palaces, right up to the fountains and churches of the Baroque period, which perhaps more than any other era has determined the look of the city today. There is the modern epoch too, from the ponderous Neoclassical structure of the post-Unification period to the self-publicizing edifices of the Mussolini years. All these various eras crowd in on one other to an almost overwhelming degree: there are medieval churches atop ancient basilicas above Roman palaces; houses and apartment blocks incorporate fragments of eroded Roman columns, carvings and inscriptions; roads and piazzas follow the lines of ancient amphitheatres and stadiums.

All of which is not to say that Rome is an cushy place to absorb on one visit; you need to approach things slowly, even if you only have a few days here. You can’t see everything on your first visit to Rome, and there’s no point in even trying. Most of the city’s sights can be approached from a variety of directions, and it’s part of the city’s allure to stumble crossways things by accident, gradually piecing together the whole, rather than marching around to a timetable on a predetermined route. In any case, it’s hard to get anywhere very fast. Despite regular pledges to ban motor vehicles from the city centre, the congestion can be awful. On foot, it’s cushy to lose a sense of direction winding about in the twisting old streets. In any case, you’re so likely to come upon something interesting it hardly makes any difference.

Rome doesn’t have the nightlife of, say, Paris or London, or even of its Italian counterparts to the north – culturally it’s rather rustic – and its food , while delicious, is realistic rather than haute cuisine. But its region is like no other city – a monumental, busy capital and yet an appealingly relaxed place, with a centre that has yet to be taken over by chainstores and big multinational hotels. Above all, there has perhaps never been a better time to visit the city, whose notoriously crumbling infrastructure is looking and functioning better than it has done for some time – the result of the feverish activity that took place in the last months of 1999 to have the city centre looking its best for the Church’s jubilee. On the surface the city still looks much as it has done for years. But there are museums, churches and other buildings that have been “in restoration” as long as anyone can remember that have reopened, and some of the city’s historic collections have been rehoused, making it all the more cushy to get the most out of Rome.

Category: Rome