Campo San Cassiano: Opera, Courtesans and the Malvasie
Why is it significant?
You have come into a quiet campo beside a canal, with a squat church and a bell tower that looks older than everything around it. Nothing here tells you that this little square once changed the history of music.
Key Facts
| Place | Campo San Cassiano: Opera, Courtesans and the Malvasie |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo San Cassiano, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43970, 12.33210 |
| Part of Walk | Fish, Wine and Cicchetti: Venice's Rialto Markets and the Bacari of San Polo |
| Generated | Generated |
You have come into a quiet campo beside a canal, with a squat church and a bell tower that looks older than everything around it. Nothing here tells you that this little square once changed the history of music.
In 1637, in a theatre owned by the Tron family here in the parish of San Cassiano, an opera was performed for a paying public for the first time in history. Until then opera had been a luxury of princes, staged in palaces for invited guests. Here anyone with the price of a ticket could walk in. Within a few decades Venice had a whole string of opera houses, and an evening at the theatre became as Venetian as a glass of wine.
If the church is open, look for a dramatic Crucifixion by Tintoretto, painted in 1568, with ladders leaning against the crosses like workmen on a building site. It is one of his strangest and most human scenes, a crowd going about its business at the foot of a tragedy.
Just a few steps away lies the old district of the Carampane, which the Republic set aside for its prostitutes. A little bridge nearby is still called the Ponte de le Tette, the Bridge of Breasts, and legend says the women were encouraged to show themselves bare-breasted at the windows above it to tempt passing men. Whether that was ever a real rule is doubtful, but the name has survived every attempt to make it respectable.
Old Venice also had its own wine shops for the night, the malvasie, named after the sweet Malvasia wine shipped from the Greek port of Monemvasia. Several alleys in the city are still called Calle de la Malvasia. Opera, wine, courtesans... Venetians always knew how to fill an evening. Now walk west over the next bridge to a small square that has hardly changed in five hundred years.