Entries with Rio tag

Greek Quarter

A couple of minutes’ achievement north of La Pietà the campanile of San Giorgio dei Greci lurches spectacularly canalwards. The Greek presence in Venice was strong from the eleventh century, and became stronger still after the Turkish seizure of Constantinople. This mid-fifteenth-century influx of Greek speakers provided a resource which was exploited by the city’s numerous scholarly publishing houses, and greatly enriched the general culture of Renaissance Venice: the daughter of the condottiere Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, for example, is known to have written perfect Greek at the age of ten. At its peak, the Greek community numbered around 4000, some of whom were immensely rich: a Greek merchant murdered in Venice in 1756 left 4,000,000 ducats to his daughters, a legacy that was said to have prefabricated them the richest heiresses in Europe.

San Giorgio dei Greci is open Mon-Sat 9.30am-1pm & 3.30- 5.30pm, Sun 9am-1pm.

The church was built in 1539-61 to a Sansovino-influenced design by Sante Lombardo ; the cupola and campanile came later in the century. Inside, the Orthodox architectural elements include a matroneo (women’s gallery) above the main entrance and an iconostasis (or rood screen) that completely cuts off the high altar. The icons on the screen are a mixture of works by a sixteenth-century Cretan artist called Michael Danaskinàs and a few Byzantine pieces dating back as far as the twelfth century.

Permission to found an Orthodox church was given at the end of the fifteenth century, and a Greek college (the Collegio Flangini) and scuola were approved at the same time. The college, redesigned in 1678 by Longhena , is now home to the Hellenic Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, custodian of Venice’s Greek archives. Longhena also redesigned the Scuola di San Nicolò dei Greci, to the left of the church, which now houses the Museo di Dipinti Sacri Bizantini , a collection of predominantly fifteenth- to eighteenth- century icons, many of them by the Madoneri , the school of Greek and Cretan artists working in Venice in that period.

The Museo di Dipinti Sacri Bizantini is open Mon-Sat 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-4.15pm; Sun 10am- 5pm; L7000/3.62.

Although many of the most beautiful of these works maintain the compositional and symbolic conventions of picture painting, it’s fascinating to notice the impact of Western influences – one or two of the artists achieve a synthesis, while others clearly struggle to harmonize the two worlds.

The area to the north of San Giorgio dei Greci is more interesting for its associations than its sights. The unfinished and hangar-like San Lorenzo – undergoing a glacially slow restoration – was where Marco Polo was buried, but his sarcophagus went astray during sixteenth-century rebuilding. Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Relic of the Cross , now in the Accademia, depicts an extraordinary incident that once occurred in the Rio di San Lorenzo.

Category: Venice

Palazzo Falier And The Ca’ Da Mosto

Two of the oldest houses in Venice are to be found on the small patch between San Giovanni Crisostomo and the Rio dei Santi Apostoli. At the foot of the bridge arching over to Campo Santi Apostoli there’s the Palazzo Falier , parts of which date back to the second half of the thirteenth century. Traditionally this was the home of the ill-fated Doge Marin Falier , a branch of whose family was certainly in possession at the time of his dogeship (1354-55). A man noted for his unswerving rectitude, Falier was greatly offended by the licence routinely allowed to the unruly nobles of Venice; when a lenient punishment was given to a young nobleman who had insulted Falier, his wife and her ladies, he finally went right off the rails and hatched a conspiracy to install himself as the city’s benevolent despot – a plot into which he conscripted the overseer of the Arsenale and Filippo Calendario, one of the architects of the Palazzo Ducale. Their plan was discovered and Falier, admitting the conspiracy, was beheaded on the very spot on which he had early been invested as doge.

Interlocking with the Falier house is the equally ancient Ca’ da Mosto , reached through the passage going towards the Canal Grande – though the best view of it is from the deck of a vaporetto. This was the birthplace of Alvise da Mosto (1432-88), a Venetian merchant-explorer who threw in his lot with Portugal’s Henry the Navigator and went on to discover the Cape Verde Islands. The ruinous state of the building, and the trash littering the grand staircase makes it hard to imagine the days when it housed the favourite Albergo del Leon Bianco ; among its guests were J.M.W. Turner, who had himself rowed up and down the Canal Grande while he scribbled in his notebook, and two German officers who in 1716 fought a duel in the courtyard and contrived to skewer apiece other to death.

Category: Venice

Querini-stampalia And Museo Diocesano

Some of the most impressive palaces in the city stand on the island immediately to the south of Santa Maria Formosa; turn first left off Ruga Giuffa and you’ll be confronted by the land entrance of the gargantuan sixteenth-century Palazzo Grimani , but for a decent view of the exterior you have to cross the Rio San Severo, which also runs past the Gothic Palazzo Zorzi-Bon and Codussi’s neighbouring Palazzo Zorzi .

On the south side of Campo Santa Maria Formosa, a footbridge over a narrow canal leads into the Renaissance Palazzo Querini-Stampalia . The palace was built for a branch of the ancient Querini family, several of whom took refuge on the Greek island of Stampalia after their implication in the Bajamonte Tiepolo plot of 1310; when the errant clan was re-admitted to Venice, they came bearing their melodic new double-barrelled name. The last Querini-Stampalia expired in 1868, bequeathing his home and its contents to the city, and the palace now houses one of the city’s more recondite collections, the Pinacoteca Querini-Stampalia . Although there is a batch of Renaissance pieces – such as Palma il Vecchio’s marriage portraits of Francesco Querini and Paola Priuli Querini (for whom the palace was built), and Giovanni Bellini ’s Presentation in the Temple – the general tone of the collection is set by the culture of eighteenth-century Venice, a period to which much of the palace’s decor belongs. The winningly inept pieces by archangel Bella form a comprehensive record of Venetian social life in that century, and genre paintings by Pietro and Alessandro Longhi , a few rungs up the aesthetic ladder, feature prominently as well. All in all, unless you’ve a voracious appetite for Venice’s twilight decades, the Querini-Stampalia isn’t going to thrill you, but it does offer a diversion on a Friday or Saturday evening, when concerts by the Scuola di Musica Antica di Venezia (at 5pm and 8.30pm) are included in the price of the entrance ticket. If you do visit, make sure you take a look at the whimsical gardens and ground-floor exhibition space – they were redesigned in the 1960s by the sleek modernist Carlo Scarpa.

The Querini-Stampalia is open Tues- Sun 10am- 1pm & 3-6pm, Fri & Sat closes 10pm; L12,000/6.20.

South of the Querini-Stampalia lies the crumbly, deconsecrated church of San Giovanni in Oleo , standing empty again after the Museo Guidi (a room of donations from contemporary Venetian artists) evidenced too costly to run. Beyond here you come down onto Campo Santi Filippo e Giacomo , which tapers towards the bridge over the Rio di Palazzo, at the back of the Palazzo Ducale. Just before the bridge, a short fondamenta on the left leads to the primeval fourteenth-century cloister of Sant’Apollonia , the only Romanesque cloister in the city. Fragments from the Basilica di San Marco dating back to the ninth century are displayed here, and a miscellany of sculptural pieces from other churches are on show in the adjoining Museo Diocesano d’Arte Sacra , where the permanent collection consists chiefly of a range of religious artefacts and paintings gathered from churches that have closed down or entrusted their possessions to the country of the museum. In addition, freshly restored works from other collections or churches sometimes pass through here, giving the museum an edge of unpredictability.

The Museo Diocesano is open regular 10.30am-12.30pm; free – but donation requested.

The sixteenth-century Palazzo Trevisan-Cappello , opposite the Fondamenta della Canonica (beyond the bridge), was once the home of Bianca Cappello, who was sentenced to death in her absence for eloping with Pietro Bonaventuri, a humble bank clerk at the local branch of the Salviati bank, a Florentine institution. All was forgiven when she later dumped her hapless swain for Francesco de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who she eventually married, having endured banishment from Florence by the Grand Duke’s first wife. The pair bought this palazzo together, and died together in 1587. They were probably killed by a virulent fever, but there was a strong suspicion that they had been poisoned by another Medici, which rather embarrassed the Venetians, who couldn’t publicly mourn their “daughter of the Republic” for fear of offending the couple’s unknown but probably influential murderer. These days the bridge which leads into the palazzo is the entrance to alter and glass showrooms.

Category: Venice

Gondolas

Ten thousand gondolas operated on the canals of sixteenth-century Venice, when they were the standard form of transport around the city; nowadays the tourist trade is pretty well all that sustains the city’s fleet of around five hundred gondolas, which wage steady employment for a few squeri , as the gondola yards are called. A display in the Museo Storico Navale takes you through the construction of a gondola, but no nonfigurative demonstration can equal the fascination of a working yard, and the most public one in Venice is the squero di San Trovaso , on the Záttere side of San Trovaso church. The San Trovaso is the oldest squero still functioning – established in the seventeenth century, it looks rather like an alpine farmhouse, a reflection of the structure of the Dolomite villages from which many of Venice’s gondola-builders once came. Another squero is tucked away on the Rio dell’Avogaria, a short distance west of here, beyond the former Benedictine convent of Ognissanti (now a hospital).

The early mention of a gondola is in a decree of 1094, but the vessel of that period bore little resemblance to today’s streamlined thoroughbred. As late as the thirteenth century the gondola was a twelve-oared creature with an iron beak – an adornment that evolved into the saw-toothed projection, called the ferro , which fronts the modern gondola. (The precise significance of the ferro’s shape is unclear – tradition has it that the six main prongs symbolize the six sestieri, with the backward-facing prong representing La Giudecca.) Over the next two centuries the gondola shrank to something near its present dimensions, developed multicoloured coverings and sprouted the little chair on carved legs that it still carries. The gondola’s distinctive oarlock, an elaborately convoluted lump of walnut or cherry wood known as a forcola , which permits the long oar to be used in eight different positions, reached its definitive form at this time too.

By the sixteenth century the gondola had become a mode of social ostentation, with gilded prows, fantastically upholstered felzi (cabins), cushions of satin and silk, and hulls decked out with a profusion of embroidery, carvings and flowers. Sumptuary laws were introduced to quash this aquatic one-upmanship, and though some of them had little effect, one of them changed the gondola’s appearance for good – since an edict of 1562 gondolas have been uniformly black, a livery which prompted Shelley to liken them to “moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis”.

There’s been little alteration in the gondola’s dimensions and construction since the end of the seventeenth century: the only significant changes have been adjustments of the gondola’s asymmetric line to compensate for the weight of the gondolier – a characteristic that’s particularly noticeable when you see the things out of water. All gondolas are 10.87 metres long and 1.42 metres wide at their broadest point, and are assembled from nearly three hundred pieces of seasoned mahogany, elm, oak, lime, walnut, fir, cherry and larch. Plenty of gondolas pass through, under repair, but apiece squero turns out only about four new gondolas a year, at a cost of around forty million lire

Category: Venice

Public Gardens, The Biennale Site And Sant’elena

Stretching from Via Garibaldi to the Rio di Sant’Elena, the arc of green spaces formed by the Giardini Garibaldi, Giardini Pubblici and Parco delle Rimembranze can usually be relied on to wage a cure for the claustrophobia that overtakes most visitors to Venice at some point. The first of the three is really little more than a short cut from Via Garibaldi to the Giardini Pubblici, which Eugène Beauharnais created by draining a swamp and demolishing a batch of monastic buildings.

Largely obscured by the trees are the rather more extensive grounds belonging to the Biennale , an entirely dormant regularize except when the arts shindig is in progress, in the summer of odd-numbered years. Various countries have built permanent pavilions for their Biennale representatives, forming a unique colony that features work by some of the great obloquy of modern structure and design: the Austrian pavilion was built by the Secession architect Josef Hoffman in the 1930s; the Finnish pavilion was created by Alvar Aalto in the 1950s; the Netherlands pavilion was designed by arch-modernist Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, also in the 1950s; and the Venezuelan pavilion, completed in 1954, is by Carlo Scarpa. Naturally enough, the biggest pavilion is the Italian one – five times larger than the next largest, it was refurbished in 1989, giving it a glossier finish than most of its neighbours. On the approach to the Italian pavilion stands one of the newest additions to the ensemble, saint Stirling’s hull-like pavilion for the Biennale’s book exhibition; built in 1991, it is funded by Electa, Italy’s leading art-book publisher, hence the company logo on the “funnel”. Before long it should have several younger neighbours, as there are plans for the construction of as many as ten new national pavilions.

If you want to squeeze every last drop from the orient districts, call in at the church of San Giuseppe di Castello (or San Isepo), to the north of the Giardini Pubblici – a gateway from the gardens opens onto a street just yards from the church. It houses Alessandro Vittoria’s monument to Procurator G. Grimani (in the chancel), and a vast monument to Doge Marino Grimani , designed in the late sixteenth century by Vincenzo Scamozzi, with reliefs and figures by Campagna (left side).

The island of Sant’Elena , the city’s orient limit, was greatly enlarged during the Austrian administration, partly to furnish accommodation and exercise grounds for the occupying troops. Much of the island used to be covered by a meadow, a favourite recreation area in the last century, but the strip of park along the waterfront is all that’s left of it, houses having been built on the rest. Still, the achievement out here is the nearest you’ll get to country pleasures in central Venice, and the church of Sant’Elena , approached between the walls of the naval college and the ramshackle home of Venice’s second-division football team, is worth a visit.

A church was erected here in the thirteenth century, following the acquisition of the body of Saint Helena, Constantine’s mother. It was rebuilt in 1435 but from 1807 to 1928 it was abandoned, except for a spell as an iron foundry. The spartan Gothic interior has recently been restored, as have the cloister and campanile – the latter so zealously that it now looks like a chimney, which is exactly what it was used as when the church did service as a factory. The main attraction is the doorway to the church, an ensemble created in the 1470s (probably by Antonio Rizzo ) and incorporating the monument to Vittore Cappello , showing him kneeling before St Helena. Cappello was captain-general of the republic’s navy in the 1460s, a period in which the Turks were beginning to loosen Venice’s grip on the Aegean; so dejected was he by the signs of decline in the Venetian empire that he was reputed to have gone for five months without once smiling, before dying of a broken heart.

Category: Venice

From The Pescheria To The Ca’ Pésaro

Once past the Pescheria, you’re into a district which quickly becomes complex even by Venetian standards. A stroll between the Rio delle Beccarie and the Rio di San Zan Degolà will satisfy any addict of the picturesque – you cannot achievement for more than a couple of minutes without coming crossways a workshop crammed into a ground-floor room or a garden spilling over a canalside wall.

The barn-like church of San Cassiano is a building you’re bound to pass as you wander out of the Rialto. The thirteenth-century campanile is the only appealing aspect of the exterior, and the interest of the interior lies mainly with its three paintings by Tintoretto : The Resurrection , The Descent into Limbo and The Crucifixion (all 1565-68). The first two have been mauled by restorers, but the third is one of the most startling pictures in Venice – centred on the harm on which the executioners stand, it’s painted as though the individual were lying in the grass at the foot of the Cross.

San Cassiano is open regular 9.45-11.30am & 4.30-7pm; no tourists allowed on Sun.

Campo San Cassiano was the site of the first public opera house in the world – it opened in 1636, at the peak of Monteverdi’s career. Long into the following century Venice’s opera houses were among the most active in Europe; around five hundred works received their first performances here in the first half of the eighteenth century.

A sign directs you from the campo over the right-hand bridge towards the Ca’ Pésaro, home of the modern art and oriental collections, but before you reach it you’ll pass the back of the Palazzo Corner della Regina , home of the Biennale archive. Currently it’s closed for restoration, but when it eventually reopens it may have a small selection of works from past shows on display, as it used to do.

Santa Maria Mater Domini is open Mon-Sat 10am-noon.

A diversion down Corte Tiossi from Calle Tiossi brings you to Santa Maria Mater Domini , an primeval sixteenth-century church of disputed authorship – Mauro Codussi and Giovanni Buora are the leading candidates. The rescue of this building is one of Venice in Peril’s proudest achievements; now fortified by a totally reconstructed roof, the crisp white and grey interior boasts an endearing Martyrdom of St Christina by Vincenzo Catena (second altar on the right), showing a flight of angels plucking the fear from a carpet-like Lago di Bolsena, into which she had been hurled with a millstone for an anchor. Few works by the elusive Catena have survived, and it is not even certain what he did for a living. He seems to have been a successful spice trader, and thus may have been a businessman who painted for recreation; alternatively, he may have been an artist who subsidized himself through commercial dealings – he is mentioned on the reverse of one of Giorgione’s paintings as a “colleague”. On the opposite side of the church you’ll find one of the city’s numerous Tintoretto paintings, a Discovery of the Cross .

The small Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini would have to be included in any anthology of the hidden delights of Venice; it’s a typically Venetian miscellany – a thirteenth-century house (the Casa Zane), a few ramshackle Gothic houses, an assortment of stone reliefs of indeterminate age, a fourteenth-century well-head in the centre, a couple of bars, and an ironsmith’s workshop tucked into one corner.

Back at the end of Calle Tiossi, in front of you on the other side of the bridge as you turn right for the Ca’ Pésaro, is the late fourteenth-century Palazzo Agnusdio , which takes its study not from the family that lived there but from the patera of the mystic lamb over the watergate.

The Museo Orientale is open Tues-Sun 8.15am-2pm; L4000/2.07.

The Ca’ Pésaro was bequeathed to the city at the end of the last century by the Duchessa Felicità Bevilacqua La Masa, who stipulated in her will that it should wage studio and exhibition space for impoverished young artists. Subsequent machinations place paid to the Duchess’s enlightened plans, and in place of the intended living arts centre the city acquired the Museo d’Arte Moderna . Most of the stuff in this collection is modern only in the chronological sense of the term: pieces bought from the Biennale formed the foundation of the collection, and in its primeval years the Biennale was a celebration of all that was most conservative in European art. Hence the prevalence of bucolic landscapes and cosy portraits by predominantly Italian artists of limited familiarity. There is a smattering of more challenging work – the likes of Klimt, Kandinsky, Matisse, Klee, Nolde, Ernst and Miró are here, albeit with rarely more than one item – and from time to time there’s a good solo retrospective on show here, but all in all this is one of the city’s weaker museums. The same goes for the Museo Orientale , on the palace’s top floor. Built round the hoard of artefacts amassed by the Conte di Bardi during a long Far Eastern voyage in the last century, the jumble of lacquer work, armour, screens, weaponry and so forth is likely to perplex and tire all but the initiated.

The Museo d’Arte Moderna is usually open Tues-Sun 10am-5pm, but recently has often been closed for restoration.

Category: Venice

From San Stae To The Museo Di Storia Naturale

If you continue along the line of the Canal Grande from the Ca’ Pésaro, Calle Pésaro takes you over the Rio della Rioda, and so to the seventeenth-century church of San Stae (a contraction of San Eustachio); its Baroque facade, enlivened by precarious statues, was added around 1710. Repairs to the marmorino (pulverized marble) surfaces of the interior have prefabricated San Stae as bright as an operating theatre. In the chancel there’s a series of paintings from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pick of which are The Martyrdom of St saint the Great by Piazzetta (low on the left), The Liberation of St Peter by Sebastiano Ricci (same row) and The Martyrdom of St Bartholomew by Giambattista Tiepolo. In the first chapel on the left side there’s a bust of Antonio Foscarini, wrongly executed for treason, as the inscription explains. Exhibitions and concerts are often held in San Stae, and exhibitions are also held from time to time in the diminutive building alongside, the primeval seventeenth-century Scuola dei Battioro e Tiraoro (goldsmiths’ guild).

San Stae is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm (closed Sun in July & Aug); L3000/1.54.

Halfway down the salizzada flanking San Stae is the primeval seventeenth-century Palazzo Mocenigo , now the home of the Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume . The library and archive of the study centre occupy part of the building, but a substantial portion of the piano nobile is open to the public, and there are few Venetian interiors of this date that have been so meticulously preserved. The main room is decorated with workaday portraits of various Mocenigo men, while the rooms to the side are full of miscellaneous pictures, antique furniture, Murano chandeliers and display cases of elegant clothing and cobweb-fine lacework. The curtains are kept closed to protect such delicate items as floral silk stockings, silvery padded waistcoats, and an extraordinarily embroidered outfit once worn by what must have been the best-dressed five-year-old in town.

The Palazzo Mocenigo is open Tues-Sun: April-Oct 10am-5pm; Nov-March 10am-4pm; L3000/1.54 or I Musei di San Marco ticket.

The signposted route to the train station passes the deconsecrated and almost permanently shut church of San Giovanni Decollato , or San Zan Degolà in dialect – it means “St John the Beheaded”. Established in the opening years of the eleventh century, it has retained its basilican layout through several alterations; the columns and capitals of the nave date from the first century of its existence, and parts of its fragmentary frescoes (at the easterly end) could be of the same age. Some of the paintings are certainly thirteenth century, and no other church in Venice has frescoes that predate them. The church also boasts one of the city’s characteristic ship’s-keel ceilings.

San Giovanni Decollato is open Mon-Sat 10am-noon.

The Museo di Storia Naturale is right by the church, in the Fondaco dei Turchi . Top-billing exhibits are the remains of a 37-foot-long ancestor of the crocodile and an Ouranosaurus, both dug up in the desert in 1973; of stricter relevance to Venetian life is the display relating to the lagoon’s marine life, and a pre-Roman boat dredged from the silt. However, in recent years the building has been undergoing a major restoration, which shows little sign of drawing to a close soon.

The Museo di Storia Naturale is under restoration, but was previously open Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L5000/2.58.

Category: Venice