Sant'Alvise

Why is it significant?

Walk into the quiet Campo di Sant'Alvise and you will probably have it almost to yourself. A plain brick façade, a Gothic doorway, a small statue of a saint above it, and not far beyond the last houses, the open lagoon. It feels like the end of the city... and in a way, it is.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk into the quiet Campo di Sant'Alvise and you will probably have it almost to yourself. A plain brick façade, a Gothic doorway, a small statue of a saint above it, and not far beyond the last houses, the open lagoon. It feels like the end of the city... and in a way, it is.

Alvise is the Venetian form of Louis, and the saint here is Louis of Toulouse. The church was founded in the late fourteenth century by a noblewoman, Antonia Venier, who, the story goes, saw the saint in a dream and decided to build him a convent for nuns. For centuries the nuns of Sant'Alvise lived in enclosure here, at the far edge of Venice, and inside you can still see the barco, the raised gallery from which they followed Mass, hidden from the eyes of the congregation.

There is also a painting worth the long walk: Giambattista Tiepolo's Road to Calvary, a huge canvas of Christ falling under the cross, painted in the middle of the eighteenth century and crowded with soldiers, horses and banners against a sky that seems to move. It is Tiepolo at his most theatrical, and you can stand before it without a queue, sometimes in complete silence.

Then there is the tale of the baby Carpaccios. Eight small, slightly naive panels with Old Testament stories hang in the church. The English critic John Ruskin decided in the nineteenth century that they were early works by Vittore Carpaccio, painted when he was still a child... and the nickname stuck. Art historians today are far more cautious and give them to other painters of the time, but Venetians still fondly call them the baby Carpaccios.

Sant'Alvise shows you the gap between the Venice everybody sees and the Venice that simply goes on living. Now walk east along the canals, past moored boats and little walled gardens, to a much larger brick church whose façade is crowded with statues: Tintoretto's church.