Venice, 2004
Churches
Miracoli
My favourite church in all Venice, perhaps because I came upon it
without the help of a guidebook. I put the camera down on the
floor and looked innocent.
The exterior, too, is very hard to photograph, without an architectural
perspective lens (are you listening, Santa?), You cannot get much
more than 15 metres away from the church.
S Stefano
Here is the inside, which has rather a fine wooden roof.
S Agnese
Even plainer than our own Agneskerk!
It always seemed to be closed when we walked by, so I have no idea what
treasures are on the inside.
S Fosca
It really was very sunny. I could resign myself to the fact that
you cant get far enough away from churches to get a decent perspective.
I took this quiet gondola stop near S Fosca while a deal was struck for
handbags. Then I walked across the little campo in fromt of S
Fosca, and found this rather decent palazzo just minding its business
on the Fondamente della Misericodia.
Actually, it seems to have been taken over the city, or regional
government.
S Giorgio Maggiore
From this side (near the Arsenale vaporeto stop), you get a good view
of some older parts of the Abbey.
A stabler platform than I had for this shot, taken earlier in the week,
from a vaporeto.
The other pages have the panoramas I took from the top of the campanile
- there was a monk running the lift, so the Abbey must be still a going
concern;. The inside is fairly plain.
There is a choir I thought superb until I visited the Frari.
There is an inscription, commemorating Saint Gellért (Gerardus),
who was tutor to Prince Imre of Hungary (son of St
Stephen). He was later to be martyred in Budapest. What
would we do without the Internet?
Salute
I don't think I had ever actually been inside the Salute until this
holiday. Fairly bog standard interior, boringly baroque.
How strange that most of the catholics I know rather dislike the
architecture of the counter-reformation. And the regulation no
photography signs were everywhere. By now, I was getting very
good at "cleaning my lens".
I think, on the whole, I prefer the outside view.
S Tomà
This is not (at least, not the modern) S Tomà. This
building is now a public library.
The inscription over the door says:
A MCCCCXXVIIII A DI XIIIIII SEPTIOBRIONE
TEPLO APOLO DE MASL VCHADE
GRIGVOL ZVANE
The shoes in the inscription suggest St Batholomew, but the
relief suggests St Thomas.
Frari
The Frari has several quite Tuscan looking side altars. This one
was furthest from the photophobic guardians.
The choir, on the other hand, would have required too much lens
polishing.
The outside must have seemed like a statement of some kind, at least in
the middle ages.
Madonna dell' Orto
Another church I had not visited until this holiday was Madonna dell'
Orto. Apparently, this was Tintoretto's parish church; the bad
news for me was that the Bellini that would have made the church "worth
the visit" was stolen in 1993.
S Zaccharia
Scuola de S Giovanni Evangelista
Trying to find somewhere to lunch on the last day, we turned down a
likely looking street, to find we were passing through a splendid
gateway:
And then we came home ...
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Mike Murphy