Bacino Orseolo (Gondoliers' Songs)
Why is it significant?
In this small rectangle of water, hemmed in by buildings, dozens of gondolas bob side by side, black hulls gleaming, their steel prows all pointing the same way. The Bacino Orseolo is a gondola station just behind Piazza San Marco. Gondoliers chat, polish brass sea horses and call out to passers-by.
Key Facts
| Place | Bacino Orseolo (Gondoliers' Songs) |
|---|---|
| Address | Bacino Orseolo, San Marco, 30124 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43430, 12.33690 |
| Part of Walk | Vivaldi, Opera and the Phoenix: A Walk Through Musical Venice |
| Generated | Generated |
In this small rectangle of water, hemmed in by buildings, dozens of gondolas bob side by side, black hulls gleaming, their steel prows all pointing the same way. The Bacino Orseolo is a gondola station just behind Piazza San Marco. Gondoliers chat, polish brass sea horses and call out to passers-by. For centuries these men were the city's street musicians.
Travellers wrote about gondoliers singing verses from Torquato Tasso's epic Jerusalem Delivered, one boat answering another across the water. In October 1786 Goethe arranged to hear it properly: he placed two singers some distance apart along the Giudecca and walked between them as they traded stanzas. He wrote that the effect, heard from afar over the lagoon, moved him deeply, a lament without sorrow.
Richard Wagner heard something darker. Living in Venice in 1858 while composing the second act of Tristan und Isolde, he lay awake one night and heard a gondolier's long, mournful call echo down a canal. He later wrote that this cry may have suggested the lonely shepherd's tune in the opera's third act. Twenty-five years later, in February 1883, Wagner died in Venice, at Ca' Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal.
The rhythm of rowing even gave music a genre of its own: the barcarolle, a song in a gentle rocking six-eight time. Mendelssohn wrote Venetian gondola songs for piano, Chopin wrote a Barcarolle, and Offenbach composed the most famous of all, the duet Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, in The Tales of Hoffmann, in an act set in a Venetian palace. Listen to the hulls knocking softly against each other and you can hear the pulse of it.
Today you are more likely to hear a hired accordion than Tasso, but the instinct to sing on the water has never quite gone. The next stretch is the longest of the walk. Go through the arcades into Piazza San Marco, cross it and the Piazzetta to the water, then follow the waterfront east over the Ponte della Paglia and along the Riva degli Schiavoni to the white church of the Pietà.