Venice: Piazza and Campanile

I believe it is best to arrive in Venice by train. The view as you exit the station is magnificent. On our first visit my wife and I shared a water taxi with some others down the Grand Canal to the Piazza. It is indescribable but no one has done a better job than Edward Hutton.* 

Canaletto--Eighteenth Century

The Piazza di S. Marco, in fact, is not merely the centre of modern or of medieval Venice; in many ways it is Venice herself. It not only contains the most famous and the most splendid buildings of the city—the Church, the Palace, the Government offices, the Library, the Bell Tower, and the Clock Tower of Venice—but it is the universal meeting place and the principal gateway of the calli, the canals, the lagoons, and the sea. All that is meant by the word Venezia is in truth there summed up and expressed.

These considerations would lead us to regard it, even though we did not know it, as the most famous Piazza in Italy and in the world; the most famous and perhaps the most beautiful. Not one of the spacious Piazzas we know so well in Rome, in Florence, in Siena, in Milan, or in Naples can be compared with it either for renown or for beauty; and as we tell over their names we have to admit that, after all, they are of no importance beside the Piazza of St. Mark. Even in Rome, where it would seem we might surely expect to find something at least to compare with it, there is, in fact, nothing; for the Piazza of S. Pietro is a mere vestibule to S. Peter’s church, and has very little to do with the life of the city; the Piazza Venezia is only a cul de sac and moreover a ruin, while the Piazza Colonna is just a gap in the Corso, the Piazza di Spagna a wilderness of strangers. There is no Piazza in Rome which may be said to be the centre of the city, or, to sum it up and in fact to stand as a symbol for it in the imagination of mankind, as the Piazza of S. Mark does even today sum up and symbolize Venice. (84-85)

 Campanile. 

But the great treasure of the Piazza was the Campanile, which came to so tragic an end in July, 1902…. That tragic day, when the Campanile rather subsided than fell, will never be forgotten by any who witnessed it, The whole of Venice seemed to be assembled in the Piazza, and very many were weeping. Men wrung their hands in frantic helplessness while the noblest tower in Italy sank, as it seemed, into the sea, weary with age. The excavations which were undertaken previous to the rebuilding, now happily nearly completed, and the scientific examination of the debris have shown that it was no insecurity in the foundations that brought the Campanile down, but rather the great old age of the bricks, many of which were little more than dust, blown through and through by the sea wind.

Happily the Campanile is now practically rebuilt—happily for to think of Venice without the Campanile of S. Mark is to us all almost an impossibility. It was not the Piazza alone that the famous bell-tower dominated, but all Venice across whose silent ways that bell, sounded by the watchman on the summit every quarter of an hour by day and night, seemed like an assurance of safety, of our civilization, of Europe, and our Faith. For it was, of course, first and foremost a belfry, and the great bells, that to some extent doubtless contributed by their vast weight to the fall, were the sweetest and noblest voices in Venice. That belfry that Buono made in 1510 was a beautiful open loggia of four arches on each face, which overlooked all Venice and the islands and might be seen from Asolo; for the height of the tower was very great, 323 feet on a base of 42 square feet. (89-90)

Modern view

* Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911.   

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