The Rough Guide to Venice & Veneto (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Author:Rough Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Italy
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2019-03-18T10:10:15+00:00

The monuments of the Lido

The green-domed Santa Maria della Vittoria might be the most conspicuous Lido monument on the lagoon side of the island, but at close quarters it’s revealed as a thoroughly abject thing. In fact, in the vicinity of the Piazzale one building alone – the Fortezza di Sant’Andrea – is of much interest, and you have to admire that from a distance, across the Porto di Lido. The principal defence of the main entrance to the lagoon, the Fortezza was designed by Sanmicheli; work began on it in 1543, in the face of some scepticism as to whether the structure would be strong enough to support the Venetian artillery. The doubters were silenced when practically all the cannons in the Arsenale were brought out to the Fortezza and fired simultaneously from its terraces, with no harmful effects except to the eardrums. Never one to overlook a commercial opportunity, Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s mayor, has announced a plan to convert the crumbling fort into a “grande polo del lusso” (“a great pole of luxury”) – in other words, yet another super-exclusive island resort.

The Sposalizio

The most operatic of Venice’s state ceremonials – the Marriage of Venice to the Sea or Sposalizio – began as a way of commemorating the exploits of Doge Pietro Orseolo II, who on Ascension Day of the year 1000 set sail to subjugate the pirates of the Dalmatian coast. (Orseolo’s standard, by the way, featured possibly the first representation of what was to become the emblem of Venice – the Lion of Saint Mark with its paw on an open book.) According to legend, the ritual reached its definitive form after the Venetians had brought about the reconciliation of Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa in 1177; the grateful Alexander is supposed to have given the doge the first of the gold rings with which Venice was symbolically married to the Adriatic. It’s more likely that the essential components of the ritual – the voyage out to the Porto di Lido in the Bucintoro with an escort of garlanded vessels, the dropping of the ring into the brine, “In sign of our true and perpetual dominion” and the disembarkation for Mass at the church of San Nicolò al Lido – were all fixed by the middle of the twelfth century. Nowadays the mayor, patriarch and a gaggle of other VIPs annually enact a sad facsimile of the grand occasion. And in case you’re wondering what happened to all those gold rings, a fifteenth-century traveller recorded – “After the ceremony, many strip and dive to the bottom to seek the ring. He who finds it keeps it for his own, and, what’s more, lives for that year free from all the burdens to which dwellers in that republic are subject.”

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