Campo Sant'Anzolo (Teatro Sant'Angelo & Palazzo Duodo)

Why is it significant?

Turn round in Campo Sant'Anzolo and look back over the rooftops: there is the bell tower of Santo Stefano, tilting against the sky like a tired guest at the end of a long party. Engineers have shored it up more than once.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Turn round in Campo Sant'Anzolo and look back over the rooftops: there is the bell tower of Santo Stefano, tilting against the sky like a tired guest at the end of a long party. Engineers have shored it up more than once. But this calm square, lined with palaces and a little oratory, has musical ghosts of its own.

Until the 1830s a church of Sant'Angelo stood here, and close by, towards the Grand Canal, stood the Teatro Sant'Angelo, which opened in 1677. It was a modest commercial opera house, and it became Antonio Vivaldi's laboratory. From the 1710s onwards he worked here not only as a composer but as an impresario: hiring singers, haggling over fees, painting the posters in his head, and staging his own operas, among them Orlando furioso in 1727.

Think about that for a moment. A Catholic priest, ordained in 1703, running an opera company in the most competitive theatre market in Europe. He said a chest complaint kept him from saying Mass, yet he travelled constantly, rehearsed late into the night and toured with the singer Anna Girò, which set tongues wagging. In 1737 the cardinal archbishop of Ferrara went as far as forbidding him to enter the city to stage an opera.

Now find Palazzo Duodo on the square. In January 1801 the Neapolitan composer Domenico Cimarosa died here, the man whose comic opera Il matrimonio segreto had so delighted Vienna that, the story goes, the emperor had the whole thing performed again the same night. Cimarosa had been imprisoned in Naples for his republican sympathies, and rumour soon claimed he had been poisoned. The doctors who examined him found illness, not poison, but Venice preferred the darker version.

Two lives a century apart, both tangled up with the stage. Venetian opera was never a polite art. It was a business, a scandal and an addiction. Head north out of the square and follow the lanes for a couple of minutes to Campo San Beneto, where a cinema keeps the name of Rossini alive.