Campo Bandiera e Moro: Three Young Men Who Never Came Home
Why is it significant?
You have arrived in a quiet, slightly lopsided square, where a Gothic palace with pointed windows looks down on a few benches and a church with a plain brick face. Children kick a ball against the walls; two old men argue in Venetian. It feels like a village, and in a sense it still is.
Key Facts
| Place | Campo Bandiera e Moro: Three Young Men Who Never Came Home |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo Bandiera e Moro, Castello, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43460, 12.34670 |
| Part of Walk | Lions, Shipyards and Saints: Venice's Castello and the Arsenale Beyond the Crowds |
| Generated | Generated |
You have arrived in a quiet, slightly lopsided square, where a Gothic palace with pointed windows looks down on a few benches and a church with a plain brick face. Children kick a ball against the walls; two old men argue in Venetian. It feels like a village, and in a sense it still is.
For centuries this was the Campo della Bragora, a name nobody can quite explain. Some say it comes from an old word for mud, others from the Greek agora, a marketplace, others from fishing nets. The church in the corner, San Giovanni in Bragora, is where a sickly newborn called Antonio Vivaldi was baptised in 1678. The future Red Priest of Venetian music grew up in these very streets, the son of a barber who played the violin.
The square's modern name tells a darker story. Attilio and Emilio Bandiera were Venetian brothers, sons of an admiral and officers themselves in the Austrian navy, which then ruled Venice. In 1844 they deserted and sailed to Calabria with a handful of companions, hoping to spark an uprising for a free and united Italy. They were betrayed almost at once. On 25 July 1844 they were shot near Cosenza, together with their comrade Domenico Moro and several others. Emilio was twenty-five.
The story goes that they faced the firing squad shouting 'Viva l'Italia'. Whatever their last words were, their deaths became a rallying cry for a whole generation, and after Venice joined Italy in 1866 this campo took their names. Their remains were later brought home to Venice, to lie among the city's honoured dead.
Look again at the Gothic palace with its pointed arches, Palazzo Gritti Badoer... it was already centuries old when the brothers were boys. Venice keeps all its centuries in one frame, and nobody here finds that strange. Now head north along the little calle beside the church, toward a canal where a brotherhood of sailors from across the Adriatic kept a treasure house.