Castello
Northeast of San Marco, Castello is home among other things to the Miracoli church, built in the
1480s to house a painting of the Madonna which was believed to have performed a number of
miracles, such as reviving a man who'd spent half an hour lying at the bottom of the Giudecca canal.
The church is thought to have been designed by Pietro Lombardo, who with his two sons Tullio and
Antonio oversaw the building and executed much of the carving, which ranks as some of the most
intricate decorative sculpture in Venice.
East of here, the Campo San Zanipolo (a contraction of Santi Giovanni e Paolo) is the most
impressive open space in Venice after Piazza San Marco, dominated by the huge brick church of San
Zanipolo (daily 7am-12.30pm & 3.30-7.30pm), founded by the Dominicans in 1246, rebuilt and
enlarged from 1333 and finally consecrated in 1430. The church is perhaps best known for the tombs
and monuments around the walls, the memorials of some 25 doges, most impressive of which is
perhaps the tomb of Doge Michele Morosini on the right of the chancel, selected by Ruskin as "the
richest monument of the Gothic period in Venice". On the square outside the church, Verrochio's
statue of the Venetian military hero Bartolomeo Colleoni is one of the finest Renaissance equestrian
mounuments in Italy, commissioned in 1481.
The other essential sight in this area is over to the east of San Marco - the Scuola di San Giorgio
degli Schiavoni (Tues-Sat 10am-12.30pm & 3-6pm, Sun 10am-12.30pm; L5000), set up by Venice's
Slav population in 1451. The building dates from the early sixteenth century, and its interior looks
more or less as it would have then, with a superb ground-floor room decorated with a cycle painted
by Vittore Carpaccio between 1502 and 1509.
The Northern Islands
The major islands lying to the north of Venice - Murano, Burano and Torcello - can be reached by
vaporetto from the Fondamente Nuove: the
52, which runs about every fifteen minutes, will take you to San Michele and Murano; for Burano
and Torcello there is the
12 (roughly hourly), which takes forty minutes to Burano, from where it's a short hop to Torcello.
This service can also be caught from Murano, at the Faro landing stage.
Chiefly famed as the home of Venice's glass-blowing industry, Murano's main fondamente are
crowded with shops selling the mostly revolting products of the furnaces, but the process of
manufacture is more interesting. There are numerous furnaces to visit, all free of charge on the
assumption that you will then want to buy something, though you won't be pressed too hard to do
so. Many of the workshops are along Fondamenta dei Vetrai. There's also the Museo Vetrario in the
Palazzo Giustinian (10am-5pm; closed Wed; L8000), which displays Roman pieces and the earliest
surviving examples of Murano glass from the fifteenth century. Your entry ticket will also get you
into the Modern and Contemporary Glass Museum on Fondamenta Manin (same hours). Other
attractions include the church of San Pietro Martire, a Dominican Gothic church which houses an
elegant Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, and the Veneto-Byzantine church of Santi Maria e Donato,
founded in the seventh century and rebuilt in the twelfth (daily 8am-noon & 4-7pm), which has a
beautiful mosaic floor.
Burano is still largely a fishing community, although there is also a thriving trade in lace-making
here, and the main street is crammed with shops selling Burano-point and Venetian-point lace.
Making the lace is extremely exacting work, both highly skilled and mind-bendingly repetitive, with
an enormous toll on the eyesight. Each woman specializes in one particular stitch, and so each piece
is passed from woman to woman during its construction. The skills are taught at the Scuola dei
Merletti in Piazza Baldessare Galuppi (Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 10am-4pm; L3000), which also
houses a small museum with work dating back as far as the sixteenth century.
The island of Torcello was settled as early as the fifth century, and once had a population of some
twenty thousand. Nowadays, however, the population is about one hundred, and there is little visible
evidence of the island's prime. The main reason that people come here today is to visit Venice's first
cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta (daily 10am-12.30pm & 2-5pm; L1500), a Veneto-Byzantine
building on the site of an original seventh-century church, only the crypt of which survives. The
interior has an eleventh-century mosaic floor and a stunning twelfth-century mosaic of the Madonna
and Child in the apse, resting on an eleventh-century mosaic frieze of the Apostles. Look in also on
the church of Santa Fosca, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to house the body of the
eponymous saint, brought to Torcello from Libya some time before 1011 and now resting under the
altar. In the square outside sits the curious chair of Attila: sit in it and - local legend says - you will
be wed within a year. Behind, the Museo dell'Estuario (Tues-Sun 10.30am-12.30pm & 2-5pm;
L3000) displays thirteenth-century beaten gold figures, sections of mosaic heads and pieces of
jewellery.
The Southern Islands
Immediately south of the Palazzo Ducale, Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore stands on the
island of the same name (daily 9am-noon & 2.30-6pm). This proved one of the most influential
Renaissance church designs, and it has two pictures by Tintoretto in the chancel - The Fall of Manna
and The Last Supper, perhaps the most famous of all his images, painted as a pair in 1592-94, the
last years of the artist's life. On the left of the choir a corridor leads to the Campanile, rebuilt in 1791
after the collapse of its predecessor and one of the two best vantage points in the city. The ex-
Benedictine monastery next door, now the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, is one of the architectural gems
of Venice, incorporating a 128-metre-long dormitory designed by Giovanni Buora around 1494, and
many other impressive bits and pieces by Longhena and Palladio - you may only visit by appointment
(041/528.9900), except when the building is hosting an exhibition.
The long island of La Giudecca, to the west, was where the wealthiest aristocrats of early
Renaissance Venice built their villas, and in places you can still see traces of their gardens, although
the present-day suburb is a strange mixture of decrepitude and vitality, boatyards and fishing quays
interspersed with half-abandoned factories and sheds. Unless you're staying at the Cipriani, the most
expensive hotel in Venice, the main reason to come is the Franciscan church of the Redentore (daily
7.30am-noon & 3.30-7pm), designed by Palladio in 1577 in thanks for Venice's deliverance from a
plague that killed a third of the population. Sadly, the church is in a bad state of repair, and a rope
prevents visitors going beyond the nave, but you can see its best paintings, including a Madonna with
Child and Angels by Alvise Vivarini, in the sacristy, as well as a curious gallery of eighteenth-century
wax heads of illustrious Franciscans.
Sheltering Venice from the open sea, the thin strand of the Lido used to be the focus of the annual
hullaballoo of Venice's "Marriage to the Sea", when the doge went out to the Porto di Lido to drop a
gold ring into the brine and then disembarked for mass at San Nicoḷ al Lido. Later it became the
smartest bathing resort in Italy, and although it's no longer as chic as it was when Thomas Mann set
Death in Venice here, there's less room on its beaches now than ever before; indeed, unless you're
staying at one of the flashy hotels on the seafront, or are prepared to pay a ludicrous fee to hire a
beach hut, you won't even be allowed to get the choicest Lido sand between your toes. There are
public beaches at the northern and southern ends of the island - though the water is, as you would
expect, filthy.
© 1997 ottmar_morett@yahoo.com
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