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.

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).