Venecia explicada

When the Western Roman Empire fragmented, various cities began to develop as seats of power, Milan was one, Ravenna was another, Aquileia also in the north of Venice, and Venice was nothing. Venice was a small fishing community situated on small marshy islands. So, historically, Venice is really separate from Italy itself.

There wasn't a Roman city, it doesn't have Roman ruins scattered around the city, it doesn't have traces of a Roman town planning with a cardo and a decumanus, it doesn't even have land. Venice is not connected to the mainland, it is an artificial island floating in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. To build in Venice, they cut trees about 15 meters high and brought them from Croatia, because they have good trees there, and they had methods to bury them vertically in the ground to build this new fortified land on which they could build their buildings.

And they still do this today, it's amazing. There are 177 canals in the city with a total length of 45 km, with more than 400 bridges, complemented by the intricate network of streets and alleys. These today constitute an incomparable medieval urban landscape that has remained practically unchanged.

The great canal with a length of more than 3 km is the only important waterway in Venice, with a maximum width of 70 meters and a minimum of 37, and along its course it forms three sharp but majestic curves. There used to be a little high ground around here and the Rialto Bridge was built to connect these points. Its name comes from Rivo Alto, which means high ground, and historically, until the 18th century that was the only bridge in Venice, and that is because in the Middle Ages the Venetians did not cross to the other side of the Grand Canal because there was no need, if they needed something, they could get it on their side of the Grand Canal, which is why historically the city was divided into very isolated neighborhoods, and the charm of Venice is that it still is.

So if you go to Venice, you probably won't enjoy it as much if you follow the route of a tourist guide that takes you to the main attractions, that is, if you go by the way that says towards Piazza San Marco or towards the train station or to the Rialto Bridge, but if you go off that road, the charm of Venice is that the streets are such a tangled mess that no one ventures out there, and you find these wonderful neighborhoods with little squares, with cisterns and restaurants, but it's easy to get lost in Venice due to its organic urban layout. The design of the urban fabric of Venice comes from the need to collect water and does not have a grid pattern. Because the city is in the middle of salt water, they had to collect water from the rain, if you look at this map, you will see that the city is full of squares, and each square has an underground cistern, so that when it rains, the water is accumulated and this became the source of fresh water, so in all the squares of Venice you will see a well like this, which is the lid of the cistern.

In the Middle Ages, Venice wanted to become a city of greater prominence, it began to expand, it began to develop an arsenal that built large ships for sea travel, and also for war. Venice became a major port, but it was still nothing like a city, because it didn't have a Roman past, it didn't have roots from ancient Rome, and it didn't have a major church, they needed to get relics to establish the presence of a major church. This painting from the 1560s by Tintoretto, a Venetian painter, shows you this crusade that the Venetians mounted in the 9th century to go to Alexandria in Egypt where the evangelist Saint Mark was buried and steal his body, because it was an important relic, we are talking about an apostle, if they could take the body of Saint Mark to Venice, then they could establish a Church and attract pilgrims, the status of the city would not be simply mercantile but also important in terms of its Christian presence in the Christian Pantheon.

One of the most memorable spatial complexes in the history of urbanism, the Piazza di San Marco, or Saint Mark's Square, actually consists of two linked squares, the piazza proper opposite Saint Mark's Basilica and the piazzetta that The complex connects it with the sea. The bell tower, independent of San Marcos, is located in a relatively narrow space between the two squares and acts as a perfectly placed hinge. And in terms of urbanism, this is called an interlocking space, you enter the second space without leaving the first, because if you are standing here, your view escapes to the other plaza.

This location began to become the central focus of the city from the year 827, when the chapel of San Marcos, originally a private chapel of the dukes, was transformed into a worthy tomb to house the body of San Marcos. The Doge's Palace, together with St. Mark's Basilica, currently forms the eastern side of the square.

The current character of the square dates back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during these centuries the buildings that surround it were built, thus establishing the shape of the site, and the three flagpoles of the basilica's façade were placed. The bell tower was rebuilt as it used to be a wooden structure attached to the surrounding buildings and is now a free standing brick building. The treatment of the pavement, which constitutes a vital element of compositional unification, was carried out in the 18th century.

Now, to understand these buildings, we must first understand the character of typical Venetian architecture. In Venice we see a preference for screen facade architecture. This is the Ca d'Oro, or golden house, perhaps the most beautiful building in Venice, it is on the Grand Canal.

You learn a lot about the architecture in Venice just by looking at its paper-thin facade. As I mentioned, there is no land in Venice, so the only way to build anything is by driving piles of wood into the ground, and importing these piles of wood to the city is expensive, so you have to be economical when placing the foundations, and that is why typically in Venice the foundations run perpendicular to the canals. The result is that the façade wall can dematerialize, the thin wall facing the canal has no structural value, it is hanging between these load-bearing walls and therefore you get this dematerialization of the surface that is truly extraordinary.

You can also see here how a Venetian house would have functioned in the Middle Ages, there is a hall for the arrival, but the hall is on the water, not on the land, so you enter the gondola, get off and then move perpendicularly through the house, so the front of the house is on the canal, and the house is receptive to water. It is also interesting in Venetian architecture to observe the rhythm of these facades, normally there is a group of windows towards the center of the facade leaving the ends solid, thus producing the effect of a central program with lateral wings. Also the ability to insist on the centers, here is a center, here is a center, here is a center, and then destabilize those centers to obtain an unstable rhythm and obtain local symmetries that dissolve and reconstitute themselves as a more complex global symmetry, and Venetian facades do that to you constantly.

And look at the characteristic way the Venetian façade touches the sky with these little crenellated elements, somehow taking the way it touches the water and slimming it down so that there can be the same lightness on both sides. Probably the most famous Venetian Gothic building is the Doge's Palace, the Duke was the ruler. If you think about gravity and the weight of the materials, it's a bit of a strange building.

We have a pretty massive wall at the top, and then below we have these thin columns, which seem to come up out of the ground without a base. Kind of an anti-gravity building, or at least a building that isn't interested in expressing and revealing the logic of how forces move through it, and of course a lot of that has to do with the fact that the foundations in Venice are parallel planes rather than perimeter planes as they would be in less swampy countries, such as this building in Florence, where the heavy material is at the bottom and the thin, light columns are at the top. Also the delicacy in the details that occur in the capitals of the columns, in the quatrefoils, and other pieces of marble only demonstrate the excellence and refinement of execution of this building.

Look at the surface, the way the stone blocks are laid in the Doge's Palace, this series of diamonds. And it almost seems like he's more interested in creating patterns for pattern's sake, than creating patterns to reveal how the forces are moving through the building, compare that to something like the Colosseum, where the pattern is the stacking orders of the columns , and the columns are not structural at all but ornamental, but it allows you to logically intuit how the Colosseum is structurally supported. Quite the opposite happens with the Ducal Palace.

In fact, if you were to think of something that looked like the Doge's Palace, it probably wouldn't be architecture, it would be something more like a carpet. And even the edges of a rug make you think of the lightness of how it touches the ground, the lightness of how it touches the sky, this crumbling of the solid plane of the surface in terms of its perimeter condition is very much like a fabric And especially if you think about these connections to the East that Venice had, this maritime culture, you're seeing not just palaces or churches in Alexandria, but probably also more vernacular ideas about an architecture that could be more textile-based. Look at the corner, this is an amazing detail, it looks as if two rugs have been woven into each other.

Attached to the Doge's Palace is the Ponte dei sospiri, The Bridge of Sighs, which connects the New Prison with the interrogation rooms of the Doge's Palace. The view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last view of Venice that the prisoners would see before their imprisonment, and hence its name. The Basilica of San Marcos was built in the 11th century, following the guidelines of Byzantine architecture.

The facade has five recessed portals that alternate with large pillars. The mosaics serve to enrich the tympanum of each arch with color. The San Marcos façade is very fascinating because it makes explicit use of remains.

Spoils are things you take with you as trophies for your victory over another culture. The Venetians have a large arsenal and a large fleet, and they are conquering both sides of the Adriatic Sea, the Venetians are conquering Greece, they are raiding Alexandria, they have a lot of successful battles, but for the most part they were sanctioned crusades because they were going to the lands of people who hadn't converted to Christianity, but there came a point where the Venetians got so ambitious they sacked Istanbul, Constantinople at the time, and they took this chariot from the Hippodrome, these four bronze horses, and they put it on display right above the portico central of the Basilica of San Marco, and has all kinds of spoils, such as the sons of Constantine in one of the corners of the church, the Venetians also took these, and dozens of marble columns of many colors, not only from Constantinople, but also columns from Greek temples and columns from anyone who wasn't protecting their columns well, and they have them embedded in the façade. So just as the Venetians imported the stolen body of Saint Mark, they are importing stolen architectural elements.

The church has five domes, and originally they were lowered domes with a lead roof, as was typical of Byzantine architecture, not unlike the dome of Hagia Sophia, only on a much smaller scale. You can see how they originally looked in one of the oldest mosaics inside, but in the mid-13th century they were covered with timber-framed outer domes to give it a more impressive external profile. Saint Mark's Basilica was modeled after one of the most important churches in Constantinople, the Church of the Holy Apostles, a Justinian church that was demolished by the Turks in the 15th century.

It was used as a model not because of its importance, certainly Hagia Sophia was the most important church, but because of its shape, because of its typological organization, it gives us one of the first instances of a quincunx, a church with five domes and a Greek cross plan. . So, the Basilica of San Marco recreates the same type of plan as the church of the Holy Apostles.

It is important to mention that the square piers, which support the domes, are pierced at the ground floor and gallery levels and thus the arcade of the gallery connects the piers on both sides. The narthex, or vestibule, wraps around the western arm of the cross, obscuring the shape of the floor plan from the outside, and is filled with smaller domes with mosaics of scenes from the Old Testament, such as The Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel. There you can also appreciate how detailed the pavement is with its thousands of tiny pieces of marble perfectly cut to fit these patterns, and the entire ground floor of the church is richly decorated with these marble patterns on the pavement.

The interior is covered with colored marble that covers the lower part of the walls; above, and extending over a large area over vaults and domes, is a richly colored glass mosaic lining, on which figures of saints with scenes from their lives are depicted, set off by a broad gold background. The mosaic, in fact, is the real and essential decoration of the church, to which all the architectural details are subordinated. So even the idea of ​​the material surface of the interior of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, we see here in Saint Mark, and it is this denial of the presence of material on the surface in favor of creating this luminous field of pattern and ornament.

But the decoration is far from being of a homogeneous character. The mosaics that cover the arches, vaults and domes date from the 12th to the 16th century. While medieval mosaics perfectly complement the architecture, the style of Renaissance mosaics feels out of place and inappropriate.

You can see in this model how they built the vaults by making a wooden frame to hold the stones. Now, the Byzantine churches in the East are mostly Orthodox, and although Saint Mark is Catholic, it has many characteristics of an Orthodox church due to its Byzantine style. And one of these features is the Iconostasis, which is this wall of icons and religious images, which separates the nave from the sanctuary.

Behind this is the tomb of Saint Mark, there is a ciborium that covers the altar with four very detailed columns, and below it is the sarcophagus with this inscription in Latin: Corpus Divi Marci Evangelistae, which translates as “The body of the divine Marco Evangelista ”. Behind all this is one of the most refined works of Byzantine art, the Pala d'Oro, the golden altarpiece, with the front and back decorated with icons of religious figures. And actually entering this building is amazing, especially if you go up to the museum part as there are too many people on the ground floor.

From this point, you can see the interior in its entirety as you stand right on top of the ship, and you can really get a close look at the details of the mosaics. Each mosaic is as small as a fingernail. Up here you can also see the original bronze horses up close and appreciate all the details.

They were moved here for better preservation, and the ones outside are replicas. On this upper level of the basilica you can also access the balcony and experience the beautiful view of the two squares, and analyze how the intertwined space is working. Also from this place you can take a closer look at the San Marcos clock tower and see how it changes time.

You can closely observe every detail of the facade of San Marco and the Doge's Palace. If you look towards the sea, those two columns over there are the columns of San Marcos and San Teodoro, the patron saints of the city, and they constitute the monumental access to the square for those who come from the sea. Venice is a city of light.

To appreciate the architecture of Venice it is necessary to see it at different times of the day and experience all the nuances it offers. Observe the details of the buildings from different points of view and keep in mind that it is a city different from any other. Venice is the most visually seductive of all the cities in the world, walking through the city and navigating its canals is one of the most sublime experiences one can have, because it truly feels more than any other place, like a city made to look at.

, and in my personal opinion, the most beautiful city on Earth, well. . .

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on the water. Remember I have a playlist from Italy and a playlist from the Roman Empire on my channel for you to check out. Thank you very much for staying until the end, I hope you have learned, that you have enjoyed, please like this video, it really helps me a lot, subscribe to my channel, and see you very soon in a new episode.

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