The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

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North of the Piazza
San Bartolomeo, the forecourt of the Rialto bridge and the locals’ favoured spot
for an after-work drink and chat. Another square that’s lively at the end of the day
is the Campo San Luca, within a minute’s stroll of the bar at Al Volto (see p.260),
the best-stocked enoteca in town. Secreted in the folds of the alleyways are the old
Armenian quarter and the spiralling Scala del Bovolo – featured on a thousand
postcards, but actually seen by a minority of visitors. And slotted away in a tiny
square close to the Canal Grande you’ll find the most delicate of Venice’s museum
buildings – the Palazzo Pésaro degli Orfei, home of the Museo Fortuny.
The Mercerie
The Mercerie, the chain of streets that starts under the Torre dell’Orologio and
finishes at the Campo San Bartolomeo, is the most direct route between the Rialto
and San Marco and thus, as the link between the city’s political and commercial centres,
was always a prime site for Venice’s shopkeepers, a status it retains today. (Each
of the five links in the chain is a merceria: Merceria dell’Orologio, di San Zulian, del
Capitello, di San Salvador and 2 Aprile.) A wide-eyed inventory of the Mercerie
in the sixteenth century noted “tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design,
carpets of all sorts, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every variety; and
so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white
wax!” Nowadays it’s both slick and tacky: the empire of kitsch has a firm base here,
sharing the territory with the likes of Prada, La Perla, Gucci, Furla, Cartier and
Benetton (one of the Veneto’s most successful companies). The mixture ensnares
more window-shoppers and buyers than any other part of Venice, and even in the
off-season a stroll along the Mercerie is akin to a slalom run. In summer things get
so bad that the police often have to enforce a pedestrian one-way system.
For those immune to the charms of consumerism there are only a couple of
things to stop for between the San Marco end of the Mercerie and the church of
San Salvador. Over the Sottoportego del Cappello (first left after the Torre) is a
relief known as La Vecia del Morter – the Old Woman of the Mortar. The event
it commemorates happened on the night of June 15, 1310, when the occupant of
this house, an old woman named Giustina Rossi, looked out of her window and
saw a contingent of a rebel army, led by Bajamonte Tiepolo, passing below. Possibly
by accident, she knocked a stone mortar from her sill, and the missile landed
on the skull of the standard-bearer, killing him outright. Seeing their flag go down,
Tiepolo’s troops panicked and fled back towards the Rialto. (Scores of other rebels
were killed in the Piazza; those ringleaders who survived the carnage were punished
with execution or exile – Tiepolo, as a relative of the doge, was let off with
banishment, but his house was razed to the ground.) Asked what she would like as
her reward for her patriotic intervention, Giustina requested permission to hang
the Venetian flag from her window on feast days, and a guarantee that her rent
would never be raised; both requests were granted. From then on, until the fall of
the Republic, June 15 was celebrated as a public holiday.
Further on is the church of San Giuliano or San Zulian (Mon–Sat 8.30am–noon
& 3–6pm), rebuilt in the mid-sixteenth century with the generous aid of the physician
Tommaso Rangone. His munificence and intellectual brilliance (but not his
Christian faith) are attested by the Greek and Hebrew inscriptions on the facade
and by Alessandro Vittoria’s portrait statue above the door, for which Rangone
paid almost as much as he paid for the church’s stonework. (He originally wished
to be commemorated by an effigy on the facade of his parish church, San Geminiano,
which used to stand facing the Basilica di San Marco, but the city’s governors
vetoed this excessively vainglorious proposal.) Inside, the central panel of the ceiling,
St Julian in Glory by Palma il Giovane and assistants, is a cut above the usual