Ospedaletto & the Sala della Musica

Why is it significant?

Stop in front of the church of the Ospedaletto and try not to laugh: its façade by Baldassare Longhena is crowded with giant heads and straining, muscular figures, like a crowd pressing against a shop window.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop in front of the church of the Ospedaletto and try not to laugh: its façade by Baldassare Longhena is crowded with giant heads and straining, muscular figures, like a crowd pressing against a shop window. Behind it lies the Ospedale dei Derelitti, a charitable house for the abandoned, the poor and orphans, and one of the four great ospedali of Venice, alongside the Pietà, the Mendicanti and the Incurabili.

Each of the four ran its own girls' choir and orchestra, and they competed fiercely. Leading composers, Nicola Porpora and Baldassare Galuppi among them, taught at the ospedali, and visitors went from one to another comparing performances, the way people now compare football teams. Music paid: the concerts drew donations and legacies, and a talented girl could earn a dowry, enough to marry or to enter a convent.

Hidden inside is one of the loveliest rooms in Venice, the Sala della Musica, decorated in the 1770s. Its walls and ceiling were frescoed by Jacopo Guarana, and on one wall a group of young women perform with their instruments and their music master, as if a concert had been frozen in mid-phrase. It is one of very few images we have of the figlie di coro at work.

The golden age did not last. When the Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797, the money that had sustained the ospedali dried up, and their musical life faded within a generation. The tradition that had made Venice the place every music lover had to visit simply stopped, and the manuscripts drifted into archives and private collections, where some of them waited two centuries to be played again.

So that is the score of this walk: a museum of instruments, a conservatory, theatres that burned and rose again, gondoliers, foundling girls and a red-haired priest. A short way north, on the Fondamente Nove, the lagoon opens up, and across the water lies the cemetery island of San Michele, where Igor Stravinsky was buried in 1971, close to Sergei Diaghilev. Even in death, the great names of music chose Venice. Stand still for a moment... the city is still playing.