The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

dorsoduro
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Northern Dorsoduro
The adjacent 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
(Mon–Sat 2.30–5.30pm). 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 fine Nativity by
Cima da Conegliano (before 1510), and Lorenzo Lotto’s SS. Nicholas of Bari, John the
Baptist and Lucy (1529) – featuring what Bernard Berenson ranked as one of the most
beautiful landscapes in all Italian art – hangs on the opposite side of the nave.
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.
The parish of San Barnaba
Cutting down the side of the Carmini church takes you over the Rio di San Barnaba,
along which a fondamenta runs to the church of San Barnaba. Just before
the end of the fondamenta you pass the Ponte dei Pugni, the main link between
San Barnaba and Santa Margherita, and one of several bridges with this name.
Originally built without parapets, they were the sites of ritual battles between the
Castellani and Nicolotti (see p.105); this one is inset with marble footprints marking
the starting positions. These massed brawls took place between September and
Christmas, and obeyed a well-defined etiquette, with prescribed ways of issuing
challenges and deploying the antagonists prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the
aim of which was to gain possession of the bridge. The fights themselves, however,
were sheer bedlam, and fatalities were commonplace, as the armies slugged it out
with bare knuckles and steel-tipped lances made from hardened rushes. The lethal
weaponry was outlawed in 1574, after a particularly bloody engagement that was
arranged for the visit of Henry III of France, and in 1705 the punch-ups were
finally banned, and less dangerous forms of competition, such as regattas, were
encouraged instead. Pugilists have now been replaced by tourists taking shots of
the photogenic San Barnaba grocery barge moored at the foot of the bridge.
The huge, damp-ridden San Barnaba church (Mon–Sat 9.30am–12.30pm),
built in 1749, has a trompe l’oeil ceiling painting of St Barnabas in Glory by Constantino
Cedini, a follower of Tiepolo. Despite recent restoration, the ceiling is
being restored again because of moisture damage.
At the time of the church’s construction the parish was swarming with so-called
Barnabotti, impoverished noble families who had moved into the area’s cheap lodgings
to eke out their meagre incomes. Forbidden as members of the aristocracy
to practise a craft or run a shop, some of the Barnabotti supported themselves by
selling their votes to the mightier families in the Maggior Consiglio, while others
resigned themselves to subsistence on a paltry state dole. Visitors to the city often
remarked on the incongruous sight of its silk-clad beggars – the nobility of Venice
were obliged to wear silk, regardless of their ability to pay for such finery.