My Private Italy: Three Hidden Gems in Venice for the travellers who think they’ve seen it all
Venice is the only city in the world where getting lost is the best thing that can happen to you. And yet, most visitors never do. They follow the yellow signs Per San Marco and Per Rialto, cross the same bridges as everyone else, take the same photo of the Bridge of Sighs, and leave convinced they have seen Venice.
I understand them. The first time, the Basilica, the Doge’s Palace and the Grand Canal are overwhelming, and they deserve every minute. But after many returns, something changes. You start looking for the Venice that doesn’t appear on the postcards: the one hidden behind a plain brick façade, at the end of a quiet calle, or on an island that most people only see from the deck of a vaporetto.
The good news? You don’t need to travel far to find it. Some of the most astonishing treasures in the city are just a few minutes from the crowds, guarded by modest doors and inexpensive tickets. So, let’s leave the queues behind and open three of them.
Tintoretto’s Cathedral: The Scuola Grande di San Rocco
We are in the sestiere of San Polo, a short walk from the Frari church. From the outside, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco looks like an elegant Renaissance palace. Inside, it holds what many consider the most extraordinary cycle of paintings in Venice.
The Scuole Grandi were powerful lay confraternities, rich Venetian brotherhoods devoted to charity and to a patron saint. San Rocco, protector against the plague, was one of the most beloved in a city regularly devastated by epidemics, and his brotherhood wanted a headquarters worthy of him.
In 1564 the confraternity held a competition to decorate the ceiling of one of its rooms, the Sala dell’Albergo. The greatest painters of Venice were asked to submit a preparatory drawing. Jacopo Tintoretto had other plans. On the day of the decision, when the jury arrived, his rivals presented their sketches, and Tintoretto simply pointed upwards: he had already painted the finished canvas, Saint Roch in Glory, and had it secretly installed on the ceiling.
The brothers protested. Tintoretto replied that this was how he worked, and then played his trump card: he offered the painting as a gift to the saint. The confraternity’s rules did not allow a gift to be refused. He got the job, and then he never left. For more than twenty years, from 1564 to 1587, Tintoretto and his workshop covered the walls and ceilings of the Scuola with over fifty canvases.
Climb the monumental staircase to the Sala Superiore and prepare to lose your sense of scale. The ceiling is a sea of gilded frames and dramatic Old Testament scenes; the walls tell the life of Christ in flashes of light and shadow that seem to anticipate cinema. Here’s a tip: the Scuola provides hand mirrors so you can study the ceiling without straining your neck. Walk slowly, looking down into the mirror, and the paintings will come alive above you.
Then step into the Sala dell’Albergo, where the famous competition began, and stand before Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, more than twelve metres wide: a crowded, turbulent, overwhelming scene with the cross at its still centre. The English critic John Ruskin counted this building among the three most precious in all of Italy. After twenty minutes in front of this canvas, you will understand why. And before you leave, look for the paintings by Titian, including a Christ Carrying the Cross once believed to work miracles: even here, in Tintoretto’s kingdom, the old master still has his say.
San Pantalon: the ceiling that swallowed a life
A few minutes away, just past the lively Campo Santa Margherita, stands a church that most people walk past without a second glance. San Pantalon has an unfinished façade of rough brick, the kind of exterior that suggests nothing special lies behind it. Push the door open anyway. Then look up.
Above you opens a sky full of clouds, columns, angels and saints, soaring upwards in impossible perspective. It is The Martyrdom and Glory of Saint Pantaleon, painted by Gian Antonio Fumiani between 1680 and 1704. It is made of forty canvases joined together and covers about 443 square metres, making it one of the largest paintings on canvas in the world.
Fumiani was trained as a painter of theatre sets, and it shows. With the tricks of quadratura, painted architecture that extends the real walls, he turned a flat wooden ceiling into a vertiginous vault opening onto Paradise. Stand in the middle of the nave and the illusion is complete; walk towards the edges and watch the columns bend and shift.
Fumiani worked on this ceiling for twenty-four years. Venetians still tell that, on the very day he finished it, he fell from the scaffolding and died, as if the painting had taken his whole life and had nothing more to ask of him. The truth is probably less dramatic, but he was buried in this church, under the sky he had painted.
Before you leave, look for two more treasures: in a side chapel, the last painting by Paolo Veronese, Saint Pantaleon Healing a Child, completed in 1587, and, in the small Chapel of the Holy Nail, a gleaming Gothic Coronation of the Virgin by Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna. Three centuries of Venetian painting, in a church almost nobody visits.
San Lazzaro degli Armeni: an island of books and roses
For our last stop, we leave Venice altogether. From the San Zaccaria pier, just past the Doge’s Palace, the “Vaporetto” crosses the lagoon towards the Lido. After a few minutes, it stops at a small green island crowned by a red bell tower.
In the Middle Ages, San Lazzaro was a leper colony, which explains its name: Lazarus was the patron saint of lepers. By the early 18th century, it was abandoned. In 1717, the Venetian Republic gave it to Mekhitar of Sebaste, an Armenian Catholic monk who had fled the Ottoman Empire with his followers. They built a monastery, a school and a printing press, and turned this tiny island into one of the most important centres of Armenian culture in the world. The Mekhitarist fathers still live here today.
The guided visit, usually led by one of the monks, is one of the most surprising hours you can spend in Venice. The library holds more than 150,000 books and one of the world’s largest collections of Armenian manuscripts, some illuminated in astonishing colours. The library also houses Oriental treasures, a room of rare printed books and, unexpectedly, a genuine Egyptian mummy, the priest Namenkhet Amun, who arrived here in 1825 as a gift.
When Napoleon suppressed Venice’s monasteries in 1810, San Lazzaro was spared, because the Emperor recognised it as an academy of learning. A few years earlier, the island had welcomed its most famous student: from late 1816 to early 1817, Lord Byron rowed across the lagoon almost every day to study the Armenian language with the monks. The room where he worked is still shown to visitors.
And before you leave, visit the small shop. Every spring the monks pick the roses of their garden to make Vartanush, a delicate rose-petal jam produced by hand in a few thousand jars a year. It is the sweetest souvenir Venice can offer you. Visits are in the afternoon and times can change, so check before you go.
True Venice, beyond the crowds
Three doors, three worlds, all within a short walk or a short boat ride from the crowds of San Marco. And if you still have some energy left, here is my final piece of advice.
Leave the Riva degli Schiavoni and walk east, towards the Arsenale, into the sestiere of Castello. Stop in front of the great gate guarded by marble lions, some of them brought back as war trophies from Greece. Behind those walls, for centuries, thousands of arsenalotti built the galleys of the Republic at a speed that astonished Europe, in what was the largest industrial complex of the pre-industrial world. Dante saw it at work and was so struck by the pots of boiling pitch used to seal the hulls that he placed them in his Inferno. Then turn into Via Garibaldi, Venice’s widest street, created under Napoleon by filling in a canal. Keep going, cross the wooden bridge to the island of San Pietro, and look around you.
Laundry hung between the houses. Children playing football in the campo. Old ladies chatting on a bench, fishermen repairing nets, a bacaro where the locals drink an ombra of wine at the counter. No queues, no souvenir stalls, no selfie sticks. In an instant, you will find yourself in the most authentic Venice: the one where Venetians still live. The Venice I love most.
Ciao da Marcello