San Moisè & the Teatro San Moisè

Why is it significant?

Brace yourself for the façade of San Moisè. Nearly every inch is covered: statues, garlands, obelisks and swirling stone, a riot of white marble that seems about to slide off the front of the church.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Brace yourself for the façade of San Moisè. Nearly every inch is covered: statues, garlands, obelisks and swirling stone, a riot of white marble that seems about to slide off the front of the church. It was completed in 1668 and paid for by the Fini family, whose busts and coats of arms are more prominent than any saint. John Ruskin loathed it. Plenty of visitors still find it gloriously over the top.

Opera did not stay inside palaces for long. In 1637 Venice opened the world's first public opera house, at San Cassiano near the Rialto, where anyone with a ticket could get in. Within a few years theatres sprang up all over the city, and one of them stood near this church, towards the Grand Canal: the Teatro San Moisè. In 1640 it staged L'Arianna by Claudio Monteverdi, who was then in charge of the music of San Marco.

Arianna is famous for a sad paradox: almost all of its music is lost. Only one piece survives complete, the Lament of Ariadne, her cry of despair after Theseus abandons her on an island. It was copied, printed and imitated so widely that it became the model for operatic grief. Imagine a whole opera reduced to one heartbreak... and that heartbreak outliving everything else.

Jump forward to 3 November 1810. At the Teatro San Moisè an eighteen-year-old Rossini made his professional debut with a one-act comedy, La cambiale di matrimonio, The Marriage Contract. It was a modest piece for a modest house, and it launched the career you heard about at San Beneto. The theatre itself did not survive much longer; it closed in 1818 and was swallowed by later buildings.

Inside the church lies a man who had nothing to do with music: John Law, the Scottish financier whose paper-money scheme in France collapsed spectacularly in 1720. He died in Venice in 1729, still gambling. Fittingly, the state gambling house, the Ridotto, opened in 1638 just a few steps away. Opera and gambling shared the same customers. Walk north, round the corner behind the Procuratie, to the little basin crowded with gondolas, the Bacino Orseolo.