Santa Maria della Salute

The plague of 1630–31 killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population — perhaps fifty thousand Venetians in eighteen months. On 22 October 1630 the Senate vowed a church to the Virgin in exchange for deliverance, and the city promised an annual procession in perpetuity if the disease lifted. The first stone was laid the following spring; the epidemic burned out by November 1631; the procession is still walked every 21 November.

Baldassare Longhena, then 26, won the competition with a centralised design that broke every Roman rule of proportion. The site was difficult — a narrow spit of unstable lagoon mud at the entrance to the Grand Canal — and the building had to be carried on more than 1,100,000 wooden piles driven into the silt, the largest single piling job recorded in Venetian construction.

Longhena spent the rest of his life on it: more than fifty years from competition to consecration. The dome rises on a drum buttressed by sixteen scrolling volutes — the engineering trick that lets the whole thing balance on its watery foundation. He died in 1682, five years before the church was finally consecrated by the Patriarch of Venice in November 1687, on the anniversary of the original Senate vow.

Inside, the church is paler and stricter than its façade promises. The high altar holds a Byzantine Madonna — the Mesopanditissa — brought back from Crete by Doge Francesco Morosini in 1670 after the fall of Candia. The sacristy on the left has Titian's last great cycle of ceiling panels and Tintoretto's Marriage at Cana, both transferred from suppressed monastic churches in the Napoleonic period.

Every November 21st the Festa della Salute brings half the city across a temporary pontoon bridge from San Marco — pilgrims, candles, hot castagne. Worth the timing if you are here in autumn.