The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Cannaregio
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Northern Cannaregio
synagogues (the latter, redesigned by Longhena, greatly influenced the look
of the others), and are the only two still used on a daily basis – the Levantina
in summer and the Spagnola in winter, as there is only one rabbi. Depending
on the season, one of the above can be viewed, along with the Scola al Canton
and the Scola Italiana, in an informative guided tour that begins in the Museo
Ebraico, above the Scola Tedesca in Campo del Ghetto Nuovo (daily except
Sat & Jewish hols: June–Sept 10am–7pm; Oct–May 10am–5.30pm; e3, or
free with tour, which costs e8.50; tours in English on the half-hour; last
tour June–Sept 5.30pm, Oct–May 4.30pm). The museum’s collection consists
mainly of silverware, sacred objects, textiles and furniture.
In a corner of the campo is a reminder of the ultimate suffering of the Jewish
people: a series of reliefs by Arbit Blatas, with a poem by André Tranc,
commemorating the two hundred Venetian Jews deported to the death camps
in 1943 and 1944; the names and ages of all the victims are inscribed on a
separate memorial entitled The Last Train, on your left as you walk towards
the wide iron bridge on the north side of the ghetto.
Northern Cannaregio
Land reclamation and the consolidation of the lagoon’s mudbanks has been
a continuous process in Venice since the time of the first settlers, but the
contours of the city have been modified with particular rapidity in the last
hundred years or so. As its long straight canals and right-angled alleyways
suggest, much of northern Cannaregio has come into existence comparatively
recently: the Sacca (inlet) di San Girolamo, for example, was reclaimed in
the first half of the twentieth century to provide working-class housing of a
higher standard than in much of the rest of the city.
In the area northwest from the Ghetto, inland from the Sacca, there’s
nothing to ferret out: the tiny seventeenth-century church of the Cappuccine
(open for services only) faces the equally dull but bigger and uglier (and
closed) San Girolamo, a church once used by the Austrians as a steam-powered
flour mill, with the campanile converted to a chimney. Northeast of the
Ghetto, though, is one of the most attractive domestic quarters of Venice,
and some of the city’s best restaurants and bars are dotted along its lengthy
fondamente. The colourful juxtapositions of walls, shutters, water and boats
compose a scene like Henry James’s evocation of the essence of Venice – “a
narrow canal in the heart of the city – a patch of green water and a surface of
pink wall . . . a great shabby facade of Gothic windows and balconies – balconies
on which dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-looking
doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water-steps”.
Sant’Alvise to Campo dei Mori
For all the apparent rationality of the city’s layout in this district, the church
of Sant’Alvise (Mon–Sat 10am–5pm & Sun 1–5pm; e2.50, or Chorus Pass)
is fairly tricky to get to, standing as it does on an island with no eastward land
connection with the rest of the city. Dedicated to Saint Louis of Toulouse
(Alvise being the Venetian version of Louis/Luigi), the church was commissioned
in the 1380s by Antonia Venier, daughter of Doge Antonio Venier,
after the saint appeared to her in a vision. Despite having undergone major