The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

5
Central Castello
central castello Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo
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Bordering both San Marco and Cannaregio, and spreading across the
city to the housing estates of Sant’Elena in the east, Castello is so
unwieldy a district that we’ve divided it into two sections: this chapter
describes the zone that extends from the Cannaregio border to
the canal that slices north-south through the sestiere from just beyond Santi
Giovanni e Paolo to the Pietà; everything to the east of that line is covered
in the following chapter. The points of interest in central Castello are evenly
distributed, but in terms of its importance and its geographical location,
Castello’s central building is the immense Gothic church of Santi Giovanni
e Paolo (or Zanipolo), the pantheon of Venice’s doges. The museums – the
Querini-Stampalia picture collection, the museum at San Giorgio dei
Greci, and the Museo Diocesano’s sacred art collection – lie in the southern
part of this area, where the dominant building is the majestic San Zaccaria,
a church that has played a significant part in the history of the city, as has
nearby Santa Maria Formosa, on the liveliest and most convivial square in
Castello. Busier still is the southern waterfront, the Riva degli Schiavoni,
Venice’s main promenade.
Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo
After the Piazza, the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo is the richest monumental
public space in Venice. Dominated by the huge brick church from
which it gets its name, the square is also overlooked by the most beautiful
facade of any of the scuole grande and one of the finest equestrian monuments
in the world. A row of café-bars and a perpetual gaggle of ball-playing kids
keep the atmosphere lively, and there’s a constant flow of traffic through the
square, much of it heading for the civic hospital now installed in the scuola.
The church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo
Like the Frari, the massive Gothic brick edifice of Santi Giovanni e Paolo
(Mon–Sat 7.30am–7pm, Sun 7.30am–6pm; e2.50) – slurred by the Venetian
dialect into San Zanipolo – was built for one of the mendicant orders
which burgeoned in the fourteenth century. Supporting themselves from the
proceeds of begging, the mendicants were less inward-looking than the older
orders, basing themselves in large urban settlements and working to relieve
the sick and the poor. Reflecting this social mission, their churches contain
a vast area for the public congregation, and this requirement for space meant