Museo della Musica (San Maurizio)
Why is it significant?
Push open the door of a church that no longer holds Mass, and instead of saints in the side chapels you find violins, violas, cellos and mandolins resting in glass cases like relics.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo della Musica (San Maurizio) |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo San Maurizio, San Marco, 30124 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43280, 12.33170 |
| Part of Walk | Vivaldi, Opera and the Phoenix: A Walk Through Musical Venice |
| Generated | Generated |
Push open the door of a church that no longer holds Mass, and instead of saints in the side chapels you find violins, violas, cellos and mandolins resting in glass cases like relics. This is San Maurizio, rebuilt in a cool neoclassical style from 1806, and today it is the Museo della Musica, a small museum of old instruments. It is the perfect overture for a walk through what was once the most musical city in Europe.
Why Venice? Because for three centuries this city was a factory of sound. In 1501 a printer from the Marche called Ottaviano Petrucci published here the first book of polyphonic music printed with movable type, a collection of songs known as the Odhecaton. Suddenly music could travel. Venetian presses went on to print madrigals, masses and sonatas for the whole continent, and composers from Flanders to Bohemia wanted to be published here.
And then there were the makers. In workshops a few streets from here, luthiers such as Matteo Goffriller and Domenico Montagnana built cellos so generous in sound that soloists today still compete to play them. Venetian instruments tend to be broad, warm and a little flamboyant... rather like the city itself. Look closely at the varnish on the oldest pieces, that deep reddish glow, and you are looking at a recipe nobody has fully reconstructed.
There is a quiet link with the stops ahead. The new church was designed by Giannantonio Selva together with Antonio Diedo, and Selva is the same architect who, a few years earlier, had built the opera house of La Fenice. So the room you are standing in was drawn by the hand that gave Venice its most famous stage.
Music in Venice was never only for palaces. It belonged to gondoliers, orphans, priests, gamblers and doges. Over the next couple of hours you will meet a red-haired priest who wrote some five hundred concertos, an opera house that burned down twice, and girls whose names survive only as Anna Maria of the violin. Step out into Campo Santo Stefano and cross it to the small white church at its southern end, close to the Accademia bridge.