Campo Sant'Aponal: A Shipwreck and the Birth of Baccalà
Why is it significant?
Start in a small, irregular campo with a well-head in the middle and a church whose plain brick front carries a Gothic relief of the Crucifixion. People cut through it all morning on their way to the Rialto market with empty shopping bags, and come back with full ones.
Key Facts
| Place | Campo Sant'Aponal: A Shipwreck and the Birth of Baccalà |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo Sant'Aponal, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43790, 12.33230 |
| Part of Walk | Fish, Wine and Cicchetti: Venice's Rialto Markets and the Bacari of San Polo |
| Generated | Generated |
Start in a small, irregular campo with a well-head in the middle and a church whose plain brick front carries a Gothic relief of the Crucifixion. People cut through it all morning on their way to the Rialto market with empty shopping bags, and come back with full ones.
The church is Sant'Apollinare, shortened by Venetians to Sant'Aponal. Venetian tradition says that in 1177 Pope Alexander the Third, fleeing the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, spent a night in disguise under a passage nearby, and a small inscription in the alley still remembers him. Whether he really slept on a doorstep, the story says something true: this has always been a neighbourhood where strangers find a place.
It is also the right moment to talk about the most Venetian thing you will eat today, which, strangely, comes from the Arctic. In the winter of 1431 a Venetian merchant captain, Pietro Querini, was wrecked in a storm in the Atlantic, and the survivors drifted to the island of Røst, in Norway's Lofoten islands. The fishermen there fed them cod, dried by the wind until it was as hard as wood. The story goes that Querini brought this stockfish home, and Venice never looked back.
Venetians call it baccalà, though elsewhere in Italy that word means salted cod. Here it is the air-dried stockfish, soaked for days, poached, then beaten slowly with olive oil until it becomes a white, airy cream: baccalà mantecato. Spread on grilled polenta or a slice of bread, it is the classic cicchetto of every Venetian bar, and on the lean days of Lent it was once almost obligatory.
Watch for it in the glass counters along this walk, and notice how locals eat it: standing, quickly, with a small glass of wine. Now take the Ruga Vecchia San Giovanni, the busy lane heading north-east, toward the Rialto, the oldest commercial heart of the city.