San Giacomo di Rialto and the Hunchback of the Market
Why is it significant?
Stop in the busy little square in front of a tiny church with a Gothic wooden porch and a big clock face on its front. Arcades of shops run all around you, and the crowd coming down off the bridge flows past without a glance.
Key Facts
| Place | San Giacomo di Rialto and the Hunchback of the Market |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo San Giacomo di Rialto, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43860, 12.33530 |
| Part of Walk | Fish, Wine and Cicchetti: Venice's Rialto Markets and the Bacari of San Polo |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in the busy little square in front of a tiny church with a Gothic wooden porch and a big clock face on its front. Arcades of shops run all around you, and the crowd coming down off the bridge flows past without a glance. This is San Giacomo di Rialto, which Venetians fondly call San Giacometo, little Saint James.
Legend says it was founded in 421, on the very day Venice itself was born, which would make it the oldest church in the city. The building you see was largely rebuilt around 1600, but it kept its old plan and its porch. Walk round to the back and look at the apse: a Latin inscription carved there tells the merchants of Rialto, more or less, to keep their law fair, their weights true and their contracts honest. A sermon in stone, aimed straight at the market.
This square was a trading floor of the whole Mediterranean. Bankers sat under the arcades with their ledgers open, and from the late 1500s the Republic's public bank worked here. In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, people keep asking what news there is on the Rialto, because whatever happened at sea, in Constantinople or Alexandria, you heard it here first. The street running back toward the bridge is the Ruga degli Oresi, the goldsmiths' street, rebuilt after a fire in 1514 destroyed almost the whole market.
Across the square, find a stooping stone man crouched under a little staircase that leads up to a granite column. He is the Gobbo di Rialto, the hunchback of Rialto, carved in 1541 by Pietro da Salò. From that column officials read out the laws of the Republic. And tradition says that petty thieves, sentenced to run naked from Saint Mark's to Rialto while the crowd beat them, ended their ordeal here, collapsing to kiss the hunchback.
It is said that anonymous verses mocking the powerful were stuck on him in the night, just as on his famous cousin Pasquino in Rome. Now step out toward the Grand Canal, past the stalls of fruit and vegetables, and follow the market along the water to a great hall of open arches.