The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

mixed multitude of Jews, Turks, and Christians; lawyers, knaves, and pick-pockets;
mountebanks, old women, and physicians; women of quality, with masks; strumpets
barefaced . . . a jumble of senators, citizens, gondoliers, and people of every
character and condition”. Jugglers, puppeteers, sweet-sellers, fortune-tellers and a
host of other stallholders seem to have been almost perennial features of the landscape,
while Venetian high society passed much of the day in one or other of the
Piazza’s dozen coffee shops – Europe’s first bottega del caffè opened here in 1683, and
within a few decades Goldoni had created a play in which the hero, a café owner,
declared “my profession is necessary to the glory of the city”. During the Austrian
occupation of 1814–66 the coffee houses were drawn into the social warfare
between the city’s two hostile camps. Establishments used by the occupying troops
were shunned by all patriotic Venetians – Quadri became an Austrian coffee house,
Piazza festivities
The Piazza’s brightest splash of colour comes from the Carnevale. Though gangs of
masked and wildly costumed revellers turn every quarter of the city into a week-long
open-air party, all the action tends to drift towards the Piazza, and the grand finale
of the whole proceedings is a huge Shrove Tuesday ball in the square, with fireworks
over the Bacino di San Marco.
Mass entertainments used to be far more frequent, taking over the Piazza on feast
days and whenever a plausible excuse could be found. From the twelfth century
onwards pig hunts and bullfights were frequent spectacles, but around the beginning
of the seventeenth century the authorities became increasingly embarrassed
by these sanguinary pursuits, and they were relegated to other squares in the city.
The blood sports were succeeded by gymnastic performances known as Labours
of Hercules, in which teams of young men formed human pyramids and towers on
platforms that were often no more than a couple of planks resting on a pair of barrels.
Military victories, ducal elections and visits from heads of state were commonly
celebrated with tournaments and pageants: a three-day tournament was held in the
Piazza in 1364 after the recapture of Crete, with guest appearances by a gang of
English knights on their way to create bedlam in the Holy Land, and in 1413 the election
of Doge Tommaso Mocenigo was marked by a tournament that was watched
by 70,000 people.
The coronation of Doge Ziani in 1172 was celebrated with a procession around
the Piazza, with the new head of state scattering coins to the populace; this ritual,
adapted from Byzantine custom, was observed by all subsequent doges. Major
religious festivals were also the occasion for lavish celebrations, the most spectacular
of which was the Procession of Corpus Domini, a performance meticulously
recorded in a painting by Gentile Bellini in the Accademia. Regrettably, not all of
Venice’s holy processions achieved the solemn dignity captured in Bellini’s picture
– in 1513 one stately progress went wrong when a row broke out over which group
had the right to enter the Piazza first, a disagreement that rapidly escalated into an
almighty punch-up.
But no festivities were more extravagant than those of Ascension Day, and it was
in the wake of Ascension that the Piazza most closely resembled the modern tourist
enclave. From the twelfth century until the fall of the Republic, the day itself was
marked in Venice by the ceremony of The Marriage of Venice to the Sea, a ritual
which inaugurated a short season of feasts and sideshows in the Piazza, culminating
in a trade fair called the Fiera della Sensa (Sensa being dialect for Ascension). The
Fiera began in 1180, when, as a result of Pope Alexander III’s proclamation that an
indulgence would be granted to anyone who prayed in San Marco during the year,
the city was flooded with pilgrims. Before long it became a cornucopia of luxury
commodities, and by the last century of the Republic’s existence it had grown into a
fifteen-day fair that filled the Piazza with temporary wooden shops and arcades.
san marco
|
The Piazza
47