Campo Santo Stefano & Palazzo Pisani (Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello)

Why is it significant?

Stand in the middle of Campo Santo Stefano, one of the largest squares in Venice, and listen before you look. If a window is open in the great palace on the western side, you may catch scales on a piano, a trumpet repeating the same phrase, a soprano warming up.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand in the middle of Campo Santo Stefano, one of the largest squares in Venice, and listen before you look. If a window is open in the great palace on the western side, you may catch scales on a piano, a trumpet repeating the same phrase, a soprano warming up. That palace is Palazzo Pisani, and for well over a century it has housed the city's school of music, today the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello.

Benedetto Marcello, whose name it carries, was a Venetian nobleman, lawyer and composer born in 1686. He is remembered for a wicked little pamphlet of 1720, Il teatro alla moda, a satire on the opera business. It advises composers never to read the libretto and singers to chat on stage while their colleagues are singing. Many readers have seen in it a dig at a certain red-haired composer and impresario... Antonio Vivaldi.

The palace itself is enormous. The Pisani family began it in the early 1600s and kept enlarging it for more than a century, until it reached back towards the Grand Canal around two internal courtyards. Students now practise where patricians once held their balls. One of them was a young Venetian called Luigi Nono, who studied here with the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero and went on to become one of the boldest voices of twentieth-century music.

Now turn to the church at the northern end. Santo Stefano belonged to Augustinian friars, and it is the resting place of Giovanni Gabrieli, who died in 1612. As organist of San Marco he wrote for several choirs and brass groups placed in different galleries, so that sound reached the listener from every side. His Sonata pian' e forte of 1597 is often cited as one of the first pieces to mark loud and soft in the score. A year after his death, Claudio Monteverdi arrived to run the music of San Marco, and stayed for thirty years.

One more oddity: part of the church is built over a canal, which flows right underneath it. And its bell tower leans so alarmingly that you are better off judging it from the next square. Leave the campo at its northern corner, past the church door, and walk into Campo Sant'Anzolo.