Churches in Venice

Some of the oldest, most beautiful, and most magical churches are out in the lagoon - the two ancient churches on Torcello and Santi Maria e Donato on Murano are among my all-time favorites. This photo of Santa Fosca was taken from the Torcello campanile - one of three campanili in Venice that you can go into and up for an aerial view. And this particular one does not have an elevator/lift like the ones in San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore do! It's not a bad climb though - you climb on ramps rather than stairs.

Go to Torcello! (That's what I tell anyone who asks me about visiting any of the lagoon islands).

Churches on the Lagoon Islands

Santa Maria Assunta (Torcello)
Santa Fosca (Torcello)

San Pietro Martire (Murano)
Santa Maria degli Angeli (Murano)
Santa Maria e Donato (Murano)
Santa Chiara (former church, now a glass factory)

San Martino (Burano)
Santa Maria delle Grazie (Burano)
Santa Caterina (Mazzorbo)

San Francesco del Deserto
San Lazzaro degli Armeni
San Clemente
San Servolo
Sacca Sessola
Santa Maria delle Grazie (Isola di SM delle Grazie)

Cristo Re (Isola di Sant’Erasmo)
Sant’Eurosia alle Vignole (Isola delle Vignole)

Santa Maria della Vittoria (Lido)
Santa Maria Elisabetta (Lido)
San Nicolo del Lido (Lido)
Sant’ Antonio (Lido)
Sant’ Ignazio (Lido)
Santa Maria Assunta (Malamocco)
Santa Maria della Salute Alberoni (Alberoni)

This list came from the Patriarch of Venice website.

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "furry."

My cats can't believe that I'm not posting one of the hundreds of photos I have taken of them for "furry"!

But I couldn't resist the green furry-looking moss on these old statues I saw on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon. I might have to do "Furry, Part Two" next week to keep the cats happy though. :)

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Happy Super Bowl weekend everyone!

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Triangle."

Many triangles decorate the apse of the Basilica dei Santi Maria e Donato (also known as San Donato di Murano), a church built in 1140 on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon.

This is one of the oldest and finest churches in Venice. Inside, there's a beautiful golden mosaic of Mary, and amazing multi-colored Byzantine mosaic floors with foilage and peacocks.

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here. A few more photos of the church are below the jump.

Happy holiday weekend and happy Spring!

A pretty little corte in the sestiere of San Marco with a vera da pozzo used as a planter. The corte is named for a demolished church, Sant' Andrea della Certosa (or Sant' Andrea of the Lido), that was out on an lagoon island close to the Lido. The Sant' Andrea monks owned a hospice in town where they would stay when they rowed over to Venice for business. The hospice was built in 1272, and this relief (showing St. Andrew and worshippers) was added in the 14th century.

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Upside Down." Fun theme!

Pretty much everyone who goes to Venice with a camera ends up taking reflection-in-a-canal photos; it's just irresistible. Plus, you never know what you'll get since it all depends on the time of day, the position of the sun, etc.

I took these on a cold and cloudy winter day on Torcello, a beautiful island in the Venetian lagoon. I've flipped them upside down. The red brick in the upper right corner is the sidewalk I was standing on when I took the photos.

In this next one, you can see the bell tower of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello's thousand-year-old cathedral, down in the bottom right corner. It's upside down because I flipped the photo! It's also covered with scaffolding for restoration work.

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Thanks for visiting and have a good weekend.

When I was strolling around the island of Burano looking for shrines, I found a little corte filled with cats.

These two were not that happy to see me. I barely got this photo before they ran off and disappeared.

The other adults pretty much ignored me and continued with their meditations on life.

This beauty seems to be sticking her tongue out at me.

But then I was approached by this incredibly friendly and talkative orange kitten. He was chattering away, rubbing against my ankles, trying to climb my leg, and just generally demanding attention and petting (which he got). He was like a cross between my two cats back home - LuLu's looks and Maria's chatty personality.

So the three highlights of my December trip to Venice were the Joy Singers concert in the church of Santo Stefano, my daytrip to Padua to see the Giotto frescoes, and the day I spent on Torcello. And I can’t believe I haven’t written about Torcello yet! It’s mainly because I took so many photos that day and it’s taken me a while to go through them and also because I just didn’t know where to start, it was such a wonderful day with my best church visit ever.

It’s easy to get there from Venice. Go to the vaporetto stop on Fondamenta Nuove in Cannaregio and catch boat LN (Laguna Nord) which is the express boat to Burano. There you change boats to line T (for Torcello). The whole trip takes about 45 minutes to an hour and it’s a fun ride. You’ll pass San Michele, the cemetery island, with its beautiful Renaissance church, cruise past Murano and then by a number of romantic and mysterious abandoned lagoon islands with ruins on them. You can enjoy the crazy colors of Burano either before or after the trip to Torcello.

But why go to Torcello? Lots of reasons (and it’s going to take many blog posts to share them all) but in the words of writer Henry James, go to Torcello because enchantment lurks there. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

When you get to Torcello, the first thing you see is a shrine to Madonna right there at the vaporetto landing. In the distance, you see the campanile of the cathedral. Turn around to see how vast and lonely and beautiful the lagoon looks.

To get to the piazza and the churches, you walk about a third of a mile along the main canal. The modern brick sidewalk you walk on is a bit controversial (more about that later). You don’t have to walk very far before you begin to see cats. Lots of cats! The Torcello cat colonies are what I expected to see when I first went to Venice but didn’t. There are cats in the gardens, cats hanging out with the young girls working at the souvenir kiosk, cats lounging around the piazza, cats on the rooftops of houses, even cats inside the cathedral!

I saw a "Work Underway" sign at the vaporetto landing on Torcello, but I didn’t know that this work was so controversial until I read the book, Venice: The Tourist Maze , and learned about what the locals refer to as "lo scempio di Torcello" (the ruination of Torcello). In 1999, a plan was unveiled to widen the vaporetto landing and the fondamenta along the main canal and rebuild them with modern materials. The book reports that by May 2000, posters were plastered all over Venice and other lagoon islands that read:

"Goodbye Torcello! The Magistrato alle Acque is spending 28 billion lire to devastate the island with cyclopian works in steel and reinforced concrete. Of the very ancient charm of the island there will not remain a trace. Visit it while you can, because before too long you won't recognize it anymore."

This is the smaller of the two churches that remain on Torcello and was built in the 11th century to house the body of the third-century virgin martyr saint, whose body and that of her nurse and fellow martyr, Santa Maura, were brought to Torcello in the 10th century. Santa Fosca was a local girl of sorts, from Ravenna, who was enormously popular in the Middle Ages (there’s also a church dedicated to her in Venice in Cannaregio).

This is a perfectly harmonious little Byzantine church built on a Greek Cross plan with a wooden ceiling and very little decoration inside. There’s something very magical about the simplicity of the interior of this one. The porch connecting Santa Fosca with the cathedral was added in the 16th century.

In front of the Torcello cathedral are the ruins of the 7th century baptistry – a round and romantic hole-in-the-ground that in December 2008 was filled with water. Not sure what's so fascinating and attractive about these ruins but I stood and looked at this for a long time.

In the early days of Christianity, it was common to build a separate baptistry so that believers could be purified before entering the church. Two of the most famous free-standing baptistries in Italy are the one in Florence across from the Duomo and the one in Pisa with its amazing acoustics. At some point, churches began including the baptistry as a chapel or separate room that's inside the church itself.

The more I blog about Torcello, the more I think of to say (and I’ve got photos galore) so this may keep going for a while. But I’m going to jump ahead to the best part – what happened in the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta (my best church visit ever).

The Torcello cathedral celebrated "il millennio” (its thousandth anniversary) last year – it’s the oldest monumental building in the lagoon and is such a gorgeous place with everything I love about Venetian sacred architecture….lots of old glowing marble, a magical Madonna mosaic on the golden apse, multi-coloured mosaic floors, an ancient wooden ceiling, fresco fragments here and there, and Byzantine carvings with peacocks and flowers and twining grape vines.

So I was already blissed out just strolling around the cathedral when I looked over and saw two of the Torcello cats walk in the church, one a lovely long-haired fluffy cat and the other a cute short-haired tabby. They went over and climbed up onto the pews (it was a very cold day and I figure they wanted to get off those cold marble floors).

First, I'd like to say Bon Voyage and safe travels to Kathy (Trekcapri) who leaves for Scotland tomorrow! Have a great time, and I can't wait to read all about it (and see your photos).

Back to my ramblings about my day at Torcello (at the pace I'm going, it's going to take me a month to blog about that one day!).

There are a bunch of these old well-heads on Torcello, and several of them have cool carvings on them. This cube-shaped one with a Greek cross on each side is probably the oldest vera da pozzo in the lagoon (eighth century or so).

Many of the well-heads in Venice have carvings of water jugs on them, and several on Torcello did too~

I like the tree on this one~

“Torcello is a reclaimed wilderness…Nature’s eternal youth smiles in the midst of these ruins. The air was balmy and only the sound of the cicadas disturbed the religious hush of the morning.” ~ George Sand

Santa Maria Assunta, the cathedral of Torcello, was founded in 639, rebuilt in 864 and again in 1008. What we see today is largely 11th century with a few mosaics and fragments from the earlier churches. In 1929, archeologists unearthed the altar from the 7th century church and returned it to the chancel during a restoration that removed some later Baroque additions (thank goodness they took that stuff away!).

I took only four photos inside this cathedral (and they are in my Torcello church cats post), but I did find some scanned photos to share. Since better writers than me have heaped praise on this amazing church, I’m going to let them help describe it.

There's so much cool stuff to see and photograph on Torcello. The stone chair above is called The Throne of Attilla because of a legend that it belonged to Attilla the Hun, whose rampage through the mainland drove the early citizens of Torcello into the lagoon. More than likely, it was a magistrate's chair but the name has stuck. It's supposed to be good luck to sit in it and I even overheard one tourist tell her friend that if you sit in it, you'll be married within a year. I didn't test it out. :)

A beautiful fragment on the side of Santa Fosca~

Outside the museum, there's a long wall with all kinds of reliefs, stone fragments, saints and such. And this wild guy, whoever he is~

Behind the Torcello cathedral is the small Oratory of San Marco Evangelista, built on the site where St. Mark rested on his way to Venice (or more accurately, where the guys who stole his body rested?). Legend has it that the merchants who rescued/stole the saint from his grave in Egypt were both Torcello citizens; perhaps they stopped by their home on their way to deliver the prized body to the Doge.

In December 2008, the oratory was behind a construction fence so I couldn’t get close enough to really check it out. It’s a cute little place though, and there are some intriguing ruins around it that I couldn’t get close to either.

John Ruskin said that the view from the 12th century campanile (bell tower) is “one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours.” You can see the wide expanse of the lagoon and the bell towers of the Venice skyline in the distance.

I'm determined to finish my Torcello series sooner rather than later...so here's the second cat story. This one isn't quite as dramatic as the cat who got on my lap in the cathedral, but still, It was such a strangely feline day, especially since after I left Torcello and went to Burano, I ran into another colony of cats that included a little orange kitten who tried to climb my leg.

Anyway, I stopped to pet and photograph all the many cats lounging along the canal leading down to the Piazza where the churches are. Because it was such a gray day and it wasn't raining at the time, I decided to walk around the island for a while before I went into the churches. So I was moseying along and all of a sudden, I glanced over and realized I had a companion. One of the Torcello cats had left his/her compatriots and decided to join me on my walk.

I was happy for the company and we walked together for about 20 minutes or so. Every once in a while, I'd stop and get the camera out, and the cat would stop and pose.

Torcello’s famous five-star inn, the Locanda Cipriani, has a great “Our Memories” web page which chronicles all the many famous people who have visited. It's an impressive list of royalty, artists, writers, and movie stars, and it's hilarious to read because it’s decidedly NOT chronological, and all other visitors seem to be designated as either “Before Hemingway” or “After Hemingway.”

And yes, Hemingway is at the top of the list, maybe because he not only visited Torcello many times but when he did, he tended to stay for extended periods rather than just popping in for lunch as many of the other celebrities did. In the fall of 1948, Hemingway spent a month on Torcello where wrote his Venice novel, Across the River and Into the Trees.

Confession: I tried to read this novel and I just couldn’t do it. I ended up skimming most of it and only reading the descriptions of Venice. Torcello gets a few brief mentions, but there is one nice part when the “hero” visits the Rialto Market.

A few works of art depicting Torcello. This lovely drawing is by John Ruskin~

And another Ruskin drawing, this one comparing the capitals of Torcello's Santa Maria Assunta with those of San Marco~

When I was wandering around Torcello, I saw this "Beware of the Dog" sign on a house. I heard barking and kept on walking...

Pretty soon I saw the "scary" dog and had to laugh! He was barking loudly but also wagging his stubby little tail. Terrifyingly cute...

Then the next day when I was back in Venice, I was walking around looking for churches and shrines in the sestiere of San Marco, and saw this "Beware of the Cat" sign on the door of a house. This one really made me laugh. Didn't hear any meowing or hissing though, and saw no sign of the fearsome feline...

And then a couple of days later, I saw another "Beware of the Cat" sign on a calendar in a Venetian paper store window. This time the warning was in English! I really wanted to buy this calendar, but the store was closed.

You gotta love the Internet. Yesterday I wrote that I'd love to see the dragon bones in the church of San Donato, and within hours I had photos of them in my email box!

And even better, my blog friend AnnaLivia told me that I could post her photos on my blog. I'm so grateful to her! The best part of blogging has been all the friends I've "met" from all over the world. :)

AnnaLivia has one of the most beautiful Venice blogs there is (Mes Carnets Vénitiens) and she welcomes comments in French, Italian, and English. And check out her header photo...it's the mosaic floors in this same Murano church (the best floors of all, even better than the ones in San Marco, in my opinion). She has some other photos of the church floor on her blog here.

This is such a beautiful church (love the Madonna mosaic on gold) and below the Madonna are the bones of the dragon that San Donato slayed.

To me, this church is the main reason to visit the island of Murano. The glass shops are fun, the glass museum is very interesting, but this church is magical. Opening hours are posted below. Here are a few vintage images of the church:

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Closed."

I took the first photo last year from the boat on the way to Torcello, an island in the Venetian lagoon with a couple of amazing ancient churches. When I saw the scaffolding around the bell tower, I knew that it was still closed and when I got there, the sign confirmed it.

Closed for Extraordinary Maintenance. Sounds dire, doesn't it?

The only time I've found this tower open was in 2003. The views of the lagoon from the top are fantastic but that was before I had a digital camera. I'd love to climb this tower again someday.

It was also closed when I went in 2008 (being repaired after a lightning strike), and I learned from this article that it re-opened briefly in 2009 before being closed again because of a "real and serious risk of collapse." This 12th century tower is so fragile that they've stopped ringing the bells.

And here's a late winter camellia bud...closed at the time but not for long.

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Thanks for visiting and have a good weekend. Happy April!

I don't know what the story is with this palazzo, but it sure looks spiffy now. The first photo was taken in 2008, the second in 2010. I love those red chimneys.