The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Tiepolo in the Oratory of the Crucifix (entrance under organ). This powerful
series, painted when the artist was only twenty, may persuade you to amend a
few preconceptions about the customarily frivolous-seeming Giandomenico, even
if some of the scenes do feature some lustrously attired sophisticates who seem
to have drifted into the action from the salons of eighteenth-century Venice. A
couple of Tiepolo ceiling panels and two other easel paintings supplement the Via
Crucis; back in the main part of the church, paintings by Giandomenico’s father and
Veronese are to be found on the second altar opposite the door and in the chapel
on the left of the chancel respectively, but neither shows the artist at his best. The
detached campanile, built in 1362, has a couple of twelfth-century lions at its base,
one of which is playing with a snake, the other with a severed human head.
South from Campo San Polo
Campo San Polo
If you turn right halfway down Calle dei Saoneri, you’re on your way to the Frari
(see p.128); 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 observation – 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. The Goldoni family
home, the recently refurbished Casa Goldoni (Mon–Sat 10am–5pm, Nov–March
San Polo and Santa Croce
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From the Rialto to San Tomà
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