Campo San Beneto & Teatro Rossini (former Teatro San Benedetto)

Why is it significant?

Ahead of you is a cinema, and that is the surprising part. The entrance near Campo San Beneto carries the name Rossini, and it stands on the site of the Teatro San Benedetto, one of the grandest opera houses of eighteenth-century Venice.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Ahead of you is a cinema, and that is the surprising part. The entrance near Campo San Beneto carries the name Rossini, and it stands on the site of the Teatro San Benedetto, one of the grandest opera houses of eighteenth-century Venice. It opened in 1755, burned in 1773 and was rebuilt at once, because in this city an opera house was not a luxury... it was infrastructure.

On 22 May 1813, a twenty-one-year-old from Pesaro called Gioachino Rossini premiered L'italiana in Algeri here, an opera he had written in a matter of weeks. The story of an Italian girl who outwits a Turkish bey was a triumph. Earlier that year his serious opera Tancredi had opened at La Fenice. In a single season Venice had crowned him, and the theatre was later renamed in his honour.

There is a twist that links this spot to the next one. In the 1780s the society of noble box holders who ran San Benedetto lost the building after a legal battle with the Venier family, who owned the ground. Furious, the members decided to build a new and bigger theatre of their own a few streets away. They called it La Fenice, the phoenix: a company rising from the ashes of its own defeat.

Now look across Campo San Beneto at the huge Gothic palace with rows of pointed windows. It is Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, later the home and workshop of the designer Mariano Fortuny. The odd second half of its name comes from a music society, the Orfei, which met inside from the late eighteenth century, holding concerts and balls. In this neighbourhood even the palaces are named after music.

Rossini, by the way, did not stay. Within a few years he was writing for Naples, Paris and the world, and he stopped composing operas altogether at thirty-seven, after William Tell. But it was Venice that heard him first as a grown-up composer. Follow the lanes south-east for a few minutes to Campo San Fantin, where the phoenix still stands.