Venezia Minore by Egle Renata Trincanato. A New Critical Edition
edited by Angelo Maggi
ISBN 979-12-5953-135-3
With the support of Francesco Bergamo, Elisa Bizzotto, Fernanda De Maio, Andrea Iorio, Angelo Maggi, Emanuela Sorbo
Texts
Francesco Bergamo, Elisa Bizzotto, Fernanda De Maio, Andrea Iorio, Angelo Maggi, Emanuela Sorbo
Images
Archivio Progetti, Università Iuav di Venezia
Pictures
Luca Pilot
Postproduction
Alicia Anne Tymon-McEwan
Book design
Filippo Carpanese
Final editing
Matteo Bonetto
Print
Grafiche Antiga, Crocetta del Montello (TV)
The heirs of Egle Renata Trincanato – Corrado Trincanato Balistreri e Emiliano Balistreri – have allowed the translation and the publication of this volume.
Editor’s note: In the text, the abbreviation “n.a.” refers to the “Numero Anagrafico”, an Italian numbering system that corresponds to the civic or street number of a building. Please note that Venice follows a unique system of numbering its buildings. In this edition of the book, we have also updated the house numbering to assist readers in more easily identifying the buildings referenced by Trincanato.
Publisher
Anteferma Edizioni Srl via Asolo 12, Conegliano, TV edizioni@anteferma.it
first edition June 2025
Copyright
This book is published under a Creative Commons license Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivates 4.0 International
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Angelo Maggi
Beauty and Oddity: Agnolodomenico Pica’s
Prefactory “Chapter”
Elisa Bizzotto
Humble Houses and Vernacular Architecture in Trincanato’s
Venice
Angelo Maggi
RE-STOR(y) A(c)TION : An Archeology of Consciousness
Emanuela Sorbo
Egle Renata Trincanato’s Drawings for Venezia Minore
Francesco Bergamo
Inside Venezia Minore
Andrea Iorio
Venice in Trincanato’s Reading and other “Minority Reports”
Fernanda De Maio
VENEZIA MINORE UNCELEBRATED VENICE
1. Urban Development
2. Uncelebrated Architecture
3. Minimal Construction and Hospices
4. Historical Evolution
5. Architectural and Constructive Features
6. Architects and Craftsmen
SESTIERE OF CASTELLO
1. Thirteenth and Fourteenth-century Houses
2. Fifteenth-century Houses
3. Sixteenth-century Houses
4. Seventeenth-century Houses
5. Eighteenth-century Houses
SESTIERE OF DORSODURO
1. Houses from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
2. Fifteenth-century Houses
3. Sixteenth-century Houses
4. Seventeenth-century Houses
5. Eighteenth-century Houses
Preface
Angelo Maggi
In 1948, Egle Renata Trincanato published Venezia Minore, a meticulous study of the lagoon city’s urban fabric from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Now, on the 77th anniversary of its first publication, we are proud to present this new English critical edition. Venezia Minore, or Uncelebrated Venice as we herein translate it, is a seminal work. It is fundamental for our understanding of the lagoon city’s urban fabric and has served as a foundation for later morphological studies. We hope that through the present volume we can introduce international readers to the research of the most intriguing and prolific figures to have emerged from the post-war period, the first woman to graduate in Civil Architecture from the Regio Istituto Superiore di Venezia in 1938, and a scholar who has left an indelible mark on Iuav’s architectural tradition. With this critical edition, we aspire to build on the bibliographic foundation of this tradition – following on from the almost contemporary English translations of works by Bruno Zevi (Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, 1957), Leonardo Benevolo (History of Modern Architecture, 1977), Aldo Rossi (The Architecture of the City, 1966), and Manfredo Tafuri (Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, 1976), among others – for readers keenly interested in the lesser-known architectural heritage of Venice. This edition seeks to underscore the significance of female voices in architecture, a fitting pursuit for the Università Iuav di Venezia in support of the latest gender equity policies.
Venezia Minore achieved immediate international recognition upon its release, with Nikolaus Pevsner hailing it as “an excellent new Italian book” in The Architectural Review. Lavishly illustrated with numerous drawings and photographs, the book offers a comprehensive examination of Venice’s vernacular architectural heritage and urban arrangement, analysed district by district.
Woven throughout this work – or rather Threading this work together – is the act of drawing, which Trincanato viewed as complementary to her decades-long engagement with design, study, and restoration. For Trincanato, drawing served as a speculative exercise, deconstructing images and architectural forms to uncover every facet of Venice as a city celebrated not for its monuments, but for its everyday structures.
Almost every drawing Trincanato created for this project has been preserved in the Università Iuav di Venezia’s Archivio Progetti. During the research, it also emerged that the archive holds the book’s precious layout mockup, which the author painstakingly crafted. In this edition, we have chosen to reproduce this rare artefact, rich in handwritten annotations and personal graphic details. This extraordinary document reveals the intricate care taken by Trincanato in the graphic and typographic layout of each page. Above all, however, it highlights the complex interplay
between text and image throughout Venezia Minore. This “archetype” of the book as a visual and physical object, replete with inventive arrangements of drawings and photographs, exemplifies Trincanato’s view of the printed book as both a physical and a visual artefact.
Although Venezia Minore has undergone several reprints (curated by Trincanato’s family) and inspired numerous Italian essays, there remains a scarcity of comprehensive scholarship in English to promote Trincanato’s work internationally. We hope that this edition, supported by the Università Iuav di Venezia, and by contributions from colleagues who have helped to produce this critical edition, will encourage broader access to the distinctive character of Venice’s lesser-known heritage and offer a transdisciplinary study that recontextualizes Venice for contemporary audiences.
At a time in which Iuav forms part of a network for initiatives like “Venezia capitale della sostenibilità” (Venice, Capital of Sustainability), and as the city’s incomparable amphibious form foreshadows scenarios conceivable within the near future for certain urban environments, the critical and perceptive approach Trincanato adopts in Venezia Minore seems as timely as ever. Her work, which has been republished several times in Italian, offers an invaluable lens through which we can envisage a new narrative concerning the lagoon city. For us, as researchers of various disciplines – from architecture and architectural and urban design to restoration, the history of architecture, drawing, and English literature – Venezia Minore has become an essential subject of study, suitable for broad interdisciplinary criticism using a range of methodologies.
Without doubt, this book is a tile in the mosaic of Iuav’s architectural tradition. It is remarkable not only for its contents – which focuses attention not on Venice’s monuments but on its everyday urban fabric and morphology – but for what Trincanato came to represent both within Iuav, amidst an era dominated by male voices, and within the cultural landscape of the city of Venice itself.
In terms of architectural and urban design, retracing Trincanato’s steps requires two main processes. On one hand, it involves investigating whether the declining number of permanent residents and the transformation of Venice’s residential areas into densely populated B&Bs have altered the nature of these spaces by using core samples from the neighbourhoods under consideration. On the other hand, it involves assessing how developments since 1948 have integrated within these areas. This volume thus serves as a starting point of reference for reinterpreting these spaces seventy-seven years later, paving the way for visions of Venice’s future that resonate with the insights from Venezia Minore – including those from Iuav’s architecture courses, which are also now in English.
The notion of Venezia Minore, or a Venice beyond its iconic monuments, is compelling from a literary as well as an architectural point of view, as attested in both Italian and foreign literature. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Fuoco, for instance, devotes evocative passages to the city’s lesser-known locations, enriching and revitalising its image in the artistic imagination. Similar insights can be found in representations of the city, in preservation and restoration (of minor heritage), and in the history of Venetian architecture from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. By publishing Trincanato’s work in English, in other words, we may finally amplify her vision to reach hitherto inaccessible audiences, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and disseminating her ideas beyond borders.
Acknowledgments
The curator and the Iuav colleagues involved in this English critical edition of Venezia Minore would like to extend their sincere gratitude to Trincanato’s heirs, Corrado Balistreri Trincanato and Emiliano Balistreri, for their generosity and collaboration. We are particularly indebted to the leaders of several institutions, especially the Iuav Department of Project Cultures, which hosted and funded this research, as well as the Iuav Archivio Progetti in Venice and the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, which permitted images from their collections to be included in this volume. We wish to thank Alexander Meddings, an impeccable translator, and Luca Pilot, for his meticulous expertise in image reproduction. The photographic post-production pays testament to the skilled work of Alicja Tynoń-McEwan, while the graphic design is the work of Filippo Carpanese with the supervision of Emilio Antoniol and the final editing by Matteo Bonetto. To all, we express our heartfelt thanks.
The curator would also like to thank Giorgo Nubar Ganighian for the encouragement and valuable insights he offered throughout the early stages of this project, as well as Emanuela, Elisa, Fernanda, Andrea, and Francesco. Their generous contributions and fruitful exchanges of ideas have guided and supported this research, nurturing its growth and allowing it to flourish.
Elisa Bizzotto
Beauty and Oddity: Agnolodomenico Pica’s
Prefatory “Chapter”
In 1948, the architect and historian of architecture and art Agnoldomenico Pica (1907-1990) was commissioned to write an introductory chapter – un capitolo is how the piece is defined in the volume’s frontispiece – for the first edition of a book that would become a classic in Italian architectural and urban history: Egle Renata Trincanato’s Venezia Minore (Uncelebrated Venice). Although the present edition does not feature Pica’s prefatory chapter, we should nonetheless provide an overview, since its contents may help further our understanding of Trincanato’s work.
When Venezia Minore was published in 1948, both Trincanato and Pica were cultivating important careers in the field of architecture. Trincanato, a professor at Iuav University of Venice (from which she had been the first female graduate) was an upcoming designer – a role other essays in this volume explore in detail. Pica, an established architect as well as a scholar and teacher of architectural studies, was working with leading Italian specialist journals, such as Domus and Casabella, and had produced the extensive volume Architettura moderna in Italia (Modern Architecture in Italy) in 1941. Several years earlier, Pica had presented a project for the restoration of Venice’s Accademia Bridge, which would ultimately be entrusted to Eugenio Miozzi in 1933. Through his analyses, he had come to know Venice well. Despite his recognised expertise in the field of architecture, Pica provides a plethora of cultural references to other arts – literature and painting, in particular – in his prefatory chapter to Trincanato’s book, thereby offering transcultural and transdisciplinary perspectives on the polyphony of influences that have shaped the image of the city. The text traces the inspirational role La Serenissima has played throughout the centuries, pointing to Trincanato’s possible sources and historical and theoretical frames for her book. Yet it also paints a broader picture, which tangentially refers to the Grand Tour and harkens further back to the origins of the
modern myth of the city in Western culture. By helping to navigate Trincanato’s construction of an “uncelebrated Venice”, Pica proposes an outstanding critical contribution and pertinent addition to Trincanato’s text.
Sapor di Venezia (The Essence of Venice) opens with a history of Venice’s reception since the early Middle Ages as articulated by a long series of authors and artists. Pica is sensitive to the responses by both verbal and visual media and praises – among others – Dante, Foscolo, and Flaubert, as well as Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Canaletto, and Bellotto for their remarkable re-readings within the rich palimpsest of La Serenissima’s figurations. D’Annunzio holds a special place among the group since he is the author whose role in the consolidation of the Venetian myth is explored in greater detail. In prose replete with lyricism, Pica contends that the inspiration D’Annunzio drew from Venice might have appeared as the ultimate transposition of the city into words:
Apparently, D’Annunzio’s frenzied song – his ardent and minute love, his persistent and sumptuous search – had finally tired, exhausted, almost squeezed to the limit and almost irremediably withered the inspirational possibilities of this city. This precious and strange gem that is Venice1.
Quite obviously, Pica takes D’Annunzio’s representation of Venice from The Flame (Il fuoco, 1900), one of the most paradigmatic novels of the European fin de siècle, set in the Lagoon city and glorifying its beauty and mystery in redundant decadent tones. However, as Pica points out, D’Annunzio’s overtly languid portrayal of Venice served only to diminish the city’s mythopoeic powers. In reality, it did not deter further relevant artworks – both in literature and painting – from choosing Venice as a subject. Cases in point were indeed offered by Thomas Mann, Virgilio Guidi, Le Corbusier, and Filippo de Pisis, just to quote a few.
Despite the transculturality of the artists Pica includes in his overview, his myth of Venice appears to have been especially shaped by Anglo-American poets and writers: Shakespeare, Poe, Byron, Barret-Browning, Browning, and, of course, Ruskin. Elizabeth Barret-Browning (nicknamed “Bettina” – in Italian – in the text) appears along with her husband within the category of the city’s lovers. Both were notoriously enamoured with the city, to the point that Robert Browning – who composed A Toccata of Galuppi’s (1855), one of his dramatic monologues, depicting Venice in ironically stereotypical terms, poking fun at the foreigners’ stock fascination with the city – died at Ca’ Rezzonico in 1889, thus replicating Wagner’s demise (in its turn fictionalised in D’Annunzio’s The Fire) and enhancing the secondary myth of the death in Venice. Pica’s lovers of Venice include Wagner himself, and then Stendhal, August von Platen, Goethe, Rilke, and Berenson, thus further evidencing the city’s impact across other arts and disciplines.
As the aforementioned names suggest, Pica shows a penchant for nineteenth-century culture through his analysis of the Venetian myth. The likes of Stendhal, Browning, Ruskin, and D’Annunzio offered unprecedented perspectives on the idea of Venice that would be disseminated in the twentieth century and still, in fact, shapes the
1 “Parrebbe che l’effrenato canto di D’Annunzio, il suo amore ardente e minuzioso il suo ricercare insistente e fastoso abbiano alfìne stancato, estenuato, quasi spremuto al limite e quasi appassito irrimediabilmente le possibilità ispiratrici di questa città, di questa gemma preziosa e singolare che è Venezia”. Agnoldomenico Pica, “Sapor di Venezia”, in Egle Renata Trincanato, Venezia minore. Con un capitolo di Agnoldomenico Pica, (Venezia: Filippi Editore, 1948), pp. 11-29 (p. 12). All translations from the Italian in the present contribution are mine.
Angelo Maggi
Humble Houses and Vernacular Architecture in Trincanato’s Venice
The life and legacy of Egle Renata Trincanato (1910-1998) represent a road less travelled in the architectural historiography of Venice. Despite operating within the confines of a patriarchal cultural milieu, Trincanato possessed the skills and talents to achieve positions of remarkable prestige. Driven by her love for her adoptive city, Trincanato did not conceal her convictions in private but visibly promoted them on the public stage. They inspired her not only to reinterpret the history of Venice but to become actively involved in preserving its morphology. Trincanato demonstrated a strong civic sense of duty, and, by involving all inhabitants of the Serenissima in urban planning policies, cast herself conspicuously as a conscious protagonist. Her life was coloured by a passionate attitude rooted instinctively in the principles practised and theorised by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), who wrote: “Each place has a true personality; and with this shows some unique elements – a personality too much asleep it may be, but which it is the task of the planner, as master-artist, to awaken. And only he can do this who is in love and at home with his subject – truly in love and fully at home – the love in which high intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his own fullest intensity of expression, to call forth the latent but not less vital possibilities before him”1. This perspective emphasises that any formal evaluations of a place’s unique potential must strike a diplomatic balance between the demands of modernity and the imperatives of tradition2. We can say with certainty that Trincanato perfectly encapsulated this “love in which high intuition supplements knowledge”, and that all her own fullest intensity of expressions were those of
1 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics, (London: Architectural Press, 1915), pp. 396-397.
2 See, Roberto Dulio, “Il diplomatico equilibrio. Storia, avanguardia, conservazione e progetto”, in Maddalena Scimemi and Anna Tonicello (edited by), Egle Renata Trincanato 1910-1998, (Venezia: Marsilio, 2008), pp.75-79.
faith and hope of life struggling to save Venice from a slow decay which, without a will to live, would otherwise seem fatal.
Egle Renata Trincanato was born in Rome in 1910. Her parents came from the Venetian hinterland but moved around often to accommodate her father’s mercantile business before finally settling in Venice’s San Polo district, in 1925. Here, Trincanato attended art school and, in 1933, enrolled in the Regia Scuola Superiore in Architettura. Founded by Giovanni Bordiga (1854-1933) in 1926, this was one of the first architectural schools in Italy. It would later be renamed the Istituto Universitario di Architettura Venezia before taking on its present name: Iuav University of Venice (Università Iuav di Venezia).
On the 12th of November 1938, Trincanato became the first female architect to graduate in Venice. As a student, she had taken part in numerous field trips where she had honed her use of the camera. From the photographs in the archives, however, we can see just how little the “artistic” aspect of photography interested her, despite her collection of ethereal vintage prints of Venice by the Venetian photographer Ferruccio Leiss (1892-1968)3. For Trincanato, photography was always an exceptional means of capturing her subject. Yet while photography was purely practical, drawing was her true passion. Trincanato’s continuous exploration of the city yielded hastily rendered sketches, intricate drawings, and often remarkable watercolours, which became key elements of her study. Elements of this graphic production would contribute to the work that brought her immediate acclaim.
In 1939, at the Regia Scuola Superiore in Architettura, Trincanato supervised the “Elements of Architecture and Surveying of Monuments” course held by professor and architect Giuseppe Samonà (1898-1983). Here, she started preparing teaching materials and taking care of the more specifically historical aspects of architecture. In 1941, Trincanato became a tenured assistant. Starting with their first joint project on the Red Cross building complex in Rome’s EUR district, however, an imbalance characterised Trincanato and Samonà’s working relationship and the recognition they respectively received. Her participation in the project would not go on record, but Trincanato joined Samonà in the international competition for the reconstruction of London’s Crystal Palace in 1945. Both took on an active and leading role in the Venetian school in the wake of the Second World War. In 1947, Samonà became the Rector of the school, and Trincanato obtained her professorship qualification. Henceforth, she would delegate sole supervisory responsibility for the “Elements of Architecture and Surveying of Monuments” course.
Within the unique milieu of surveying Venetian architecture, Trincanato developed the idea of compiling a day-to-day collection of sketches accompanied by critical observations of the many minor buildings scattered throughout the city. Even during the war, it is said that she would roam the streets with a notebook and pencil, making de visu surveys of building façades and later seeking out cadastral extracts from which she could reconstruct her house plans. The city’s minor dwellings, rich in detail and variety, inspired the young scholar to investigate how each building was constructed. She achieved this by conceptualising distinct structures for both
3 Leiss is regarded as one of the finest Venetian photographers of the 20th century. His often nocturnal urban scenes reveal a distinctive compositional sense. Indeed, he never gave into the rhetoric of traditional Venetian landscape photography, instead producing images that are essential, rigorous, and all centred around the captivating interplay of light. See Italo Zannier, Ferruccio Leiss fotografo a Venezia, (Milano: Electa, 1979).
the interior and the exterior, reasoning in terms of function, environment and even aesthetics. Her method organically integrated the foundational terrain and took into account each surrounding element: be it a canal, a calle, or a campo
Trincanato’s extraordinary observations paved the way for the concrete realisation of a modern approach to morphological investigation and the examination of the architectural datum. This, combined with the urban surveying work of numerous students, culminated in the publication of Venezia Minore, first published in 1948. This volume reflects Trincanato’s enduring interest in scrutinising the innermost reasons behind a strongly historicised reality that deserved attention that went far beyond its known and celebrated history. As city and architectural historian Donatella Calabi (b. 1943) has explained, her research proceeded along two parallel tracks: “the fragment and the overall form of the city from the building plan to the Sestriere as well as from the capital to the tripartite façade. Ultimately […] Trincanato moves with a refined and discreet lightness in the context of well-known scholars. Her approach represents a search for tools to investigate the building structure of a much-loved city known in the smallest details”4.
In close continuity between her scientific and teaching commitments, Trincanato’s work is the result of a meticulous historical and graphic reconnaissance of part of the residential building fabric throughout the historic heart of Venice. It bears the fruit of tireless inspections around the city, with notebook and pencil and camera, in which she reproduces, classifies, analyses, correlates construction, compositional and ornamental details of dozens upon dozens of buildings. The graphic layout created during the preparation of the book is both conspicuously abundant and rightly renowned. An effective testimony to this is the extremely rich material of the fund catalogued in the Archivio Progetti at Università Iuav di Venezia, which consists of thousands of black and white photographs, colour photos, and slides. Her photographs, and those taken by other photographers, mainly concern early Christian, Romanesque, and Byzantine architecture, Venetian buildings in general, with details of chimneys, cornices, poliforas, water gates, barbicans, inserts in the wall fabric or small openings, overhangs, hidden courtyards, courtyards with external staircases, well heads, and series of windows in terraced houses. A very important aspect of the selection of visual materials to aid the written text is the assembly in the preparatory albums themselves of photographic images and very precise freehand drawings in which the geometric position and rendering of the building are perfect. In these cases, the photograph almost serves to validate the authenticity of what has been carefully and precisely surveyed. The beautiful drawings, created with the tip of a pen almost always on thin sheets of yellowish paper, make up the volume’s imposing iconographic apparatus. Venezia Minore, a labour of love aligned with the interests the author cultivated throughout ten years at the Università Iuav di Venezia, marks the first episode of a copious scientific and editorial production by this important female architect. The work immediately found resonance within the prevailing climate of revising the principles of rationalist architecture. By reasserting the centrality of architecture in constructing Venice’s urban identity, she made a compelling case for safeguarding and enhancing the city’s historic fabric.
4 Donatella Calabi, “Egle Trincanato e l’analisi urbana negli anni cinquanta”, in Emiliano Balistreri and Anna Tonicello (edited by), L’autorevolezza lieve. Egle Trincanato a cent’anni dalla nascita – Iuav: 83 [giornale dell’università], Venice 2006, p. 4.
UNCELEBRATED VENICE
VENEZIA MINORE
EglE REnata tRincanato
Plan of Venice from the year 1346. From Cronologia Magna ab origine mundi ad annum [mill.] trgente simum quadragesimum sextum (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Latin Manuscript fondo antico n.399, sec. XIV, fol.7).
1 Urban Development
No city can compare to Venice for the influence its unique urban topography has exerted over the intimate characteristics of its architecture. These characteristics are especially pronounced in the city’s more uncelebrated, environmentally-bound architecture, which has endured remarkably well across the centuries and preserves – at least in part – its original medieval appearance. Indeed, due to the geographical constraints of its lagoon-locked location and the fortuitous absence of sudden urban sprawl, Venice has been spared the tasteless transformations that have marred so many other cities, especially over the last hundred years. Of course, stylistic evolutions, and the overlay of new buildings over the old, have partially altered some of the city’s original architectural features. The lively polychromy of its oldest frescoed plasters has faded in particular, as has the preciousness of the nielloed sculpturesque decorations that once enriched even the most modest buildings. The verdant playfulness of the more than five hundred gardens that characterised the city of Francesco Sansovino has also largely vanished, reduced to a smattering of green islands. However, today’s urban layout still reflects much of the city of old, which manifests itself most clearly amidst less celebrated architecture.
Venice’s first nucleus arose around the Rialto Islands, where the seat of the city’s government had emigrated from Malamocco, seeking safe haven from the marauding armies of Pepin, the son of Charlemagne, in the early years of the ninth century. From here the city slowly expanded, radiating outwards. Canal banks were consolidated. Roadways were organised along their marshy shores. Bridges were built between the already inhabited islands and edifices were erected on their banks, raised upon foundations of stilts and larchwood caissons. The city’s gradual and continuous waterside development gained pace as the Venetian Republic grew in wealth and influence. By the eleventh century, Venice exuded a
Above: Plan of Venice from the year 1534. From the Isolario of Benedetto Bordon (Venice, 1536, in the style of Niccolò d’Aristotele, known as Zoppino cc. XXIX. – XXX). Below: View of Venice in the fifteenth century. From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493 edition).
magnificent architectural appearance of incomparable monumental wealth. And yet, despite changing tastes, its structures always preserved elements of their earliest expression.
Today’s city encompasses roughly one hundred islands intersected by one hundred and fifty canals and connected by roughly four hundred bridges. This entire extensive urban archipelago is divided into three districts (de citra) and six divisions (sestieri). The eastward-facing sestiere of Castello is believed to owe its name to a castle that originally stood near the Lido’s port. The outermost sestiere of Cannaregio may derive its name from a contraction of the two words (canale reggio) or because this area had the highest concentration of swampy areas with reed beds (canneti).
Stretching from the tip of the Dogana to the Santa Marta dockyard is the sestiere of Dorsoduro, which also incorporates the island of Giudecca and may owe its name to the hardness of the humps that formed the soil on which it stands. Situated most centrally is the sestiere of San Marco, home to the famous Basilica of the city’s patron saint. San Polo and Santa Croce are the final two sestieri, each drawing its name from the respective churches that stood within them.
Venice’s situation within the lagoon has significantly shaped its urban layout, with numerous natural canals formed by the ebbs and flows of currents intersecting in all directions. These canals serve as the main waterways and have historically determined the pedestrian routes, especially when flanked by waterside streets or quays known as fondamente. The position and distance between one canal and another have greatly affected pedestrian accessibility, which is straightforwardly arranged with roughly orthogonal arteries when the two canals run closely and approximately parallel. When the canals are more distantly spaced, the layout becomes almost labyrinthine with arteries intersecting in every direction. Venice’s internal communication routes retain their ancient names. Narrow pedestrian streets or alleys are called calli, the walkways along the edges of the canals are fondamente, Venice’s only piazza is Piazza San Marco, while its two adjacent open spaces are called piazzette. Regardless of their size, all other squares are called campi (fields): perhaps because of the grass that once grew there and the fact they were tree-lined (until 1835, the Campo San Giovanni e Paolo was grassy; others are still tree-lined today). The campi, into which numerous calli converge, are always served by a canal (rio) that runs along at least one side to facilitate traffic. Some canals became buried in later periods, thus worsening the water and sanitary conditions (for example San Polo’s Rio Sant’Antonio and Santa Margherita’s Rio Canal were subsumed in 1761 and 1863 respectively). A corte (courtyard) is a small space, almost always served by either a single calle or sometimes by two calli arranged in a staggered layout.
The campi and smaller campielli open like lungs, inhaling the movement of their people, and are generally dominated by a church and its tall bell tower – the campanile. Here people would converge at the conclusion of a religious ceremony, and here festivities and small local markets would take place. Much narrower calli –some even spanning just 60-70 centimetres – were far more numerous than they are today, as were the city’s gardens, despite being enclosed by high walls. Gardens disappeared sooner, and more quickly in the central areas than in the peripheal ones, which are still distinguishable today by having more open space, more fondamente along the canals, and a greater number of two-storey houses than houses of three or four storeys. We do have examples of peripheral houses with four or five floors, however one or two floors were demolished in the eighteenth century due to structural instability.
2
Uncelebrated Architecture
The buildings that adhere to the impressive spatial arrangements we have outlined thus far reveal a lively engagement with overall harmony amidst Venetian uncelebrated architecture. This is evident both in the often ingenious distribution of their floor plans, and in the grace, elegance, and picturesque flair with which their façades are spaced and their volumes balanced.
Uncelebrated architectural examples of a more noble appearance are difficult to define according to any common features, and are only broadly classifiable over time because they present so many distinct solutions. These structures adhere not only to aesthetic standards but also accommodate specific topographical situations and a wide range of living needs. Cheaper constructions, comprising housing for the city’s poor, are historically better documented since they fell under the care of the state and religious confraternities who always left a record. Only scant references to the oldest buildings are found among the ancient chronicles, but numerous examples exist from the sixteenth century onwards. Given that this architecture adhered to very basic layouts to satisfy the bare necessities of life in line with certain local customs, it is plausible that more recent structures at least partly preserve the layout of older, no longer extant buildings, thereby allowing a fairly complete overview of these older, more modest examples.
Examples of this architecture that we can assign to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are few and far between. From those that remain, however, we can draw some interesting deductions in relation to the noble architecture of early medieval Venice, prior to the centuries in which the Gothic prevailed. The few palazzi that have come down to us give only a generic, approximate idea, since subsequent restorations and embellishments have profoundly modified their floor plans, and partly altered the spatial composition of their façades.
Fifteenth-century houses, Gentile Bellini,The Miracle of the Cross in San Lorenzo (Venice, Accademia).
SESTIERE OF CASTELLO
THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH-CENTURY HOUSES
Palazzetto from the twelfth/thirteenth-century in Salizzada San Lio, n.a. 5690-5691
Like its neighbouring palazzi on the same salizzada, this building has lost all trace of its original floor plan, rendering any plausible reconstruction impossible. Its façade, by contrast, remains fairly intact, and the trace of an arch with a Verona red marble impost which straddled a transversal calletta, with a more modern arch serving as an extension, indicates that the original ensemble was formed by two tower houses that shared the same features as their neighbouring palazzetto. What makes this layout so interesting is that it suggests the existence of an earlier habitation which differed considerably from the great noble palazzi of the thirteenth century. This uncelebrated dwelling lacked the usual large loggia that penetrated the entire façade (which came to be abolished in order to save space). Instead, its façade had a large bifora or trifora window, which opened directly onto a large internal hall. This type of dwelling extended vertically in height, superimposing rooms that were arranged horizontally in more noble architectural examples.
Its scheme is all the more interesting because it reveals a central openwork design between solid breaks of wall – perhaps reminiscent of the oldest wall breaks at the ends of Venice’s earliest palazzi. This scheme would soon fall into disuse, replaced by a preference for piercing the façade closer to the corners – which would persist throughout the centuries – and for tall, narrow façades with openings at either side and a solid mass in the centre. This is in complete contrast to the layout of this palazzetto on San Lio, where the decorative motifs (the capital of the curved bifora window and capitals and architrave of the upper bifora windows) evoke Ravennate characteristics in a style that echoes the most archaic architectural examples of this period. We must therefore conclude that between the end of the twelfth century and the early part of the thirteenth century, there existed a very different type of abode to the commonly known noble palazzi. Its ground floor may have been used as botteghe instead of [as] a fondaco since the building overlooked streets rather than canals, and its ground floor was probably formed of a lintelled structure with widely spaced pilasters – as we can still see today. The more enclosed upper floors arranged two or three bifora windows, one above the other around the centre. The 1
former was higher and curved (and clearly corresponded to the piano nobile) while those on the upper floors were lintelled and low.
It is entirely possible that the great arch which connected both almost equal ends was the most ornamental feature of each building, which was divided into two wings by an internal courtyard accessible from the archway. It is also possible that a building resting above the arch connected both two wings into a single structure since the crowning of the building reveals the arch to be much lower than later examples of its type.
Palazzetto from the twelfth/thirteenth-century on Salizzada San Lio. Capital belonging to the first-floor bifora window.
twelfth-thirteenth
Palazzetto from the
century on Salizzada San Lio.
Palazzetto from the twelfth-thirteenth century on Salizzada San Lio.
Palazzetto from the twelfth-thirteenth century on Salizzada San Lio. The first-floor bifora window.
SESTIERE OF DORSODURO
A thirteenth-century palazzetto on Rio di Ca’ Foscari. Detail of the ground-floor portico, by a restoration project by students of the University Institute of Architecture of Venice.
HOUSES FROM THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES
Thirteenth-century palazzetto on Rio di Ca’ Foscari (or San Pantaleon), Dorsoduro, n.a. 3393
Incorporated within a later building on the Rio di Ca’ Foscari are the remains of an ancient loggia consisting of a series of solid archivolts supported by high pedestals. All extend above the base area except for one, much wider archivolt, which must have once constituted the waterside entrance to this civil construction. The remains reveal some curious thirteenth-century sculptural characteristics. Firstly, there is the shape of the narrow and elongated arch and the typical working of the archivolt’s voussoir (two string courses frame the extrados and intrados, leaving a wide full band in the centre that is decorated with bas-reliefs of palmettes and animals). Secondly, we have the small, leafy cornice defined by a dentil pattern that runs along the extrados and the roundels embedded in the masonry between each arch. The motif that manifests itself on each of the two cornice fragments now serving as the second-floor window sills is certainly much older, and appears in several other examples, including in the ancient San Marco and Palazzo Bembo. Yet here it is lacking the visible protrusion at the end of each leaf. We can clearly see the stylistic similarities between these remains and more famous, elegant examples of the period – most notably in Palazzo Barzizza, Palazzo Lion-Morosini, Ca’ Da Mosto, Palazzo Dandolo, Palazzo Corner-Piscopia, Ca’ Palmieri (Fondaco dei Turchi) – the latter of which are more laterally closed.
Where this differs significantly, however, is in its proportions. Here, the pier of the arches is far more elongated, since the height of the arches above the impost is roughly equal to the space below (the two parts have a ratio of 1:1 while the usual proportions are at most 1:2). This results in a peculiar physiognomy that Giuseppe Fiocco plausibly attributes to the greater archaism of this house: “[…] and none go beyond the twelfth century; I recall that of San Pantaleone, so dear to Ruskin, which was certainly the oldest […]”. ([…] e niuna va oltre il XII secolo; ricordo quella di San Pantaleone, tanto cara al Ruskin, certo la più antica […]).
The arch imposts are formed of two baluster capitals carved from a single block of Verona broccatello. They must have been supported by very slender balusters made from the same material, of which only the paired bases remain. Even compared
to the upper pier, this bracket is so thin that we should assume it was either reinforced by some other no-longer extant element or that this lower part, where the storerooms of a fondaco-house were situated, was solid, with just one small window per bay to let in some light. Further evidence of this could be the two older walls that bordered the storerooms perpendicularly to the façade as a continuation of the large arch’s pillars. The effect was that they reduced the opening onto the canal for the landing of goods to just that single arch.
The position of the door may well, therefore, have been the same as the one we see today in the underpass of Corte del Papa alla Bragora, which certainly remains in situ. It was through here that one accessed the storerooms and the courtyard that probably opened up behind the building, which has a depth of about six metres and is enclosed by an older wall at the rear (at least for the lower part). As we have seen on the ground floor, the closed arches opened towards the top as the windows of a mezzanine (which had its own flooring at the height of the impost capitals) and were bordered by a parapet confined within the height of the piers. These windows may have been framed within a flat decorated band, as in the central arch. However, the sole existing trace on the smaller arch on the left suggests that these bands did not wrap restrictively around the arch, but stopped against the upper string course – just as in the surviving example. The hypothesis could be confirmed by the final rosette motif of this vertical band.
A thirteenth-century palazzetto on Rio di Ca’ Foscari. Detail of the ground-floor portico, by a restoration project by students of the University Institute of Architecture of Venice.
A thirteenth-century palazzetto on Rio di Ca’ Foscari (Palazzo Foscolo). Restoration project by students of the University Institute of Architecture of Venice. Ground portico.
June 2025
printed by Grafiche Antiga, Crocetta del Montello (TV)
