The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

interior, where the walls are plated with dark, multicoloured marble and
overgrown with Baroque statuary. Ruskin condemned it as “a perfect type of
the vulgar abuse of marble in every possible way, by men who had no eye for
colour, and no understanding of any merit in a work of art but that which
rises from costliness of material, and such powers of imitation as are devoted in
England to the manufacture of peaches and eggs out of Derbyshire spar”.
Before 1915, when an Austrian bomb that was aimed at the train station
instead plummeted through the roof of the Scalzi, the church had a splendid
Giambattista Tiepolo ceiling; a few scraps are preserved in the Accademia,
and some wan frescoes by the man survive in the first chapel on the left and
the second on the right. The second chapel on the left is the resting place of
Lodovico Manin (d.1802), Venice’s last doge. The bare inscription set into
the floor – “Manini Cineres” (the ashes of Manin) – is a fair reflection of
the low esteem in which he was held. His chief rival for the dogeship wailed
“a Friulian as doge! The Republic is dead!” when Manin was elected, and
although Lodovico can’t take the blame for the death of independent Venice,
he did display a certain lack of backbone when the final crisis loomed. In
response to French demands he meekly surrendered his insignia of office to
be burned on a bonfire in the Piazza, and when later called upon to swear an
oath of allegiance to Austria, he fell down in a dead faint.
The Lista di Spagna, San Geremia and
Palazzo Labia
Foreign embassies used to be corralled into this area to make life a little easier
for the Republic’s spies, and the Lista di Spagna takes its name from the
Spanish embassy which used to be at no. 168. (Lista indicates a street leading
to an embassy.) It’s now completely given over to the tourist trade, with shops
and stalls, bars, restaurants and hotels all plying for the same desperate trade
– people who are spending one day “doing Venice”, or those who have arrived
too late and too tired to look any further.
If you turn left up Calle della Misericordia you’ll eventually come to the
entrance to the small Parco Savorgnan (open 8am–dusk), one of Venice’s
immensely rare public green spaces. It’s not much of a park, but the benches
and the shade of the trees make it a good picnic spot. Carrying on along the
Lista you’ll reach the church of San Geremia (Mon–Sat 8.30am–noon &
4–6.30pm, Sun 9.15am–12.15pm & 5.30–6.30pm), where the travels of Saint
Lucy eventually terminated – martyred in Syracuse in 304, she was stolen from
Constantinople by Venetian Crusaders in 1204, then ousted from her own
church in Venice by the railway board in the mid-nineteenth century. (She was
also stolen from this church in 1994, but was soon returned.) Lucy’s response
to an unwanted suitor who praised her beautiful eyes was to pluck out the
offending organs, a display of otherworldliness which led to her adoption as
the patron saint of eyesight and artists. Her desiccated body, wearing a lustrous
silver mask, lies behind the altar, reclining above a donations box that bears the
prayer “Saint Lucy, protect my eyes”. Nothing else about the church is of interest,
except the twelfth-century campanile, one of the oldest left in the city.
The Palazzo Labia, next door to San Geremia, was built in 1720–50 for a
famously extravagant Catalan family by the name of Lasbias, who had bought
their way into the Libro d’Oro (the register of the nobility) for the obligatory
100,000 ducats in the middle of the previous century. Their taste for conspicuous
expenditure wasn’t lessened by the cost of the house – a party here once
Cannaregio From the train station to San Giobbe
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