The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

white dog in the final one. The scenes depicted are: St George and the Dragon;
The Triumph of St George; St George Baptizing the Gentiles (George had rescued
the princess Selene, daughter of the royal couple being baptized); The Miracle
of St Tryphone (the dainty little basilisk is a demon just exorcized from the
daughter of the Roman emperor Gordianus); The Agony in the Garden; The
Calling of Matthew; St Jerome Leading the Lion to the Monastery; The Funeral of St
Jerome; and The Vision of St Augustine (he was writing to Saint Jerome when a
vision told him of Jerome’s death).
The Madonna and Child altarpiece is by Benedetto Carpaccio, Vittore’s son,
while the panelled upstairs hall is decorated with mundane early seventeenthcentury
paintings in honour of various brethren of the scuola, which is still
functioning today.
eastern castello
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San Francesco della Vigna to the waterfront
From Sant’Antonino to the waterfront
The frequently closed church of Sant’Antonino, the next stop south along
the fondamenta from San Giorgio, is an unenticing building, founded perhaps
as far back as the seventh century but rebuilt in the seventeenth, under the
direction of Longhena, whose design for the facade was never completed. It
houses nothing of interest except a Deposition by Lazzaro Bastiani (Carpaccio’s
teacher) and a bust of Procurator Alvise Tiepolo by Alessandro Vittoria, but
some good stories are attached to it. The body of a certain Saint Saba was
enshrined here from the mid-thirteenth century until 1965, when Pope Paul
VI returned the relic to the monastery in Istanbul whence it had been stolen
by the Venetians; for all that time the Turkish monks had been meeting disconsolately
every night at their saint’s empty sarcophagus. The emblems of
Saint Anthony Abbot are a pig and a bell, and this church once kept a sty of
belled and notoriously unruly pigs – though it’s not clear if this was some sort
of tribute to their patron. The bell-ringing swine were allowed to roam the
parish unfettered, but eventually they so annoyed the locals that in 1409 their
freedom was curtailed by a sumptuary edict. “Saint Anthony loved a pig” is
still a Venetian saying, used to express a lack of surprise at a supposedly odd
occurrence. And finally, in 1819 an elephant escaped from a visiting menagerie
on the Riva degli Schiavoni and took refuge in Sant’Antonino, where
its pursuers failed to fell it with small-arms fire – they then summoned the
artillery to dispatch it with a blast from a cannon. A Paduan nobleman by the
name of Pietro Bonmartini commemorated the demise of the hapless beast in
a pamphlet entitled The Elephanticide in Venice.
San Giovanni in Brágora
Salizzada Sant’Antonin curves down to the quiet Campo Bandiera e Moro,
named after the Venetians Attilio and Emilio Bandiera and Domenico Moro,
who in 1844 were executed for leading an abortive revolt against the Bourbon
regime in Calabria. The Bandiera brothers were born at no. 3610, and all
three are buried together in Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Across the alley from the
Bandiera house stands the campo’s handsomest building, the fifteenth-century
Palazzo Gritti Badoer; a complete ruin a hundred years ago, it has been renovated
as a hotel (see p.243).
Across the square stands San Giovanni in Brágora (Mon–Sat 9–11am &
3.30–5.30pm), probably best known to Venetians as the baptismal church
of Antonio Vivaldi. The church is dedicated to the Baptist, and some people
think that its strange suffix is a reference to a region from which some relics