San Stae: Gold-Beaters, Sugar and Carnival Fritole
Why is it significant?
Come out on the Grand Canal in front of a dazzling white Baroque façade, crowded with statues and crowned by a pediment, looking straight out at the water. Beside it, a much smaller building carries a little inscription over its door.
Key Facts
| Place | San Stae: Gold-Beaters, Sugar and Carnival Fritole |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo San Stae, Santa Croce, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.44140, 12.33080 |
| Part of Walk | Fish, Wine and Cicchetti: Venice's Rialto Markets and the Bacari of San Polo |
| Generated | Generated |
Come out on the Grand Canal in front of a dazzling white Baroque façade, crowded with statues and crowned by a pediment, looking straight out at the water. Beside it, a much smaller building carries a little inscription over its door. Boats pass, the vaporetto stop knocks against its posts, and the whole scene feels like a stage set.
San Stae is the Venetian name for Saint Eustace, and the façade was built in the early 1700s by Domenico Rossi. The small house next door belonged to the guild of the battiloro, the gold-beaters, who hammered gold into leaves thinner than paper: the gold that covered the picture frames, ceilings and altars of the whole city.
Gold of another kind once passed along this canal: sugar. In the Middle Ages Venice was one of Europe's great sugar traders, bringing cane sugar from Cyprus and Crete and refining it in the city. The story goes that when King Henri the Third of France was feasted here in 1574, even the napkins, plates and bread on his table were sculpted from sugar, and he only discovered the trick when a napkin broke in his hands.
That sweet tooth never left. During Carnival every bakery fills with fritole, small doughnuts studded with raisins and pine nuts, and with galani, thin crisp ribbons of fried dough dusted with sugar. The fritter makers once had their own guild, and they fried in the open street in great pans. And all year there are zaeti, yellow cornmeal biscuits with raisins, named after zalo, the Venetian word for yellow, perfect for dipping in a glass of sweet wine.
Just along the canal stands a great dark palace of heavy rusticated stone, Ca' Pesaro, built to designs by Baldassare Longhena and now a museum of modern art. Then walk on, west through the alleys behind the canal, to a long white arcaded palace that once housed the merchants of the Ottoman Empire.