Every November 21st — the Festa della Salute — Venice closes a stretch of the Grand Canal to boats and lays a temporary bridge of pontoons across it instead. The crossing lasts about a week. It has existed, more or less in this same spot, since 1631, built to keep a promise the city made while roughly a third of its population was dying of plague.
The plague arrived in Venice in 1630 and did not let go for sixteen months. By the time it burned out, it had killed somewhere around 46,000 people in a city of about 140,000 — nobles, gondoliers, nearly a third of everyone living there. The sick were rowed out to quarantine on two lagoon islands, Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo, whose forty-day isolation period is where the word "quarantine" is believed to come from. With the city running out of options, the Senate made a vow to the Virgin Mary: end the plague, and Venice would build her a church, and process to it every year, forever.
A church with no ground to stand on
The plague lifted in 1631. The Senate kept its word. Construction started that same year on a site at the narrow mouth of the Grand Canal, chosen so that every ship sailing into Venice would pass the new church before it passed anything else. The architect, Baldassare Longhena, inherited a problem no architect wants: Venice has no bedrock, only lagoon silt, and he was being asked to carry a dome more than 60 meters wide on top of it.
His fix was to drive timber piles straight down into the mud until they hit a layer firm enough to hold weight — a figure the city still repeats today, more than a million of them, for this one building. Above the piles, he ringed the dome with eight giant stone scrolls, buttresses shaped like snail shells, doing structurally what ordinary columns couldn't on ground this soft. Longhena spent the rest of his life on the project and never saw it finished: he died in 1682, five years before the church was consecrated.
Venice had no bedrock to build on and no reason to expect the ground would hold. Longhena gave it a church that floats on timber instead.
Look back toward St Mark's from the church steps today and the view is close to unchanged from paintings Canaletto made of it nearly three centuries ago — the same low domes, the same water, minus the plague that paid for them.
Stand across the water in Campo Santa Maria del Giglio and count the scrolls ringing the dome — there are eight, and each one is load-bearing, not decorative. With Urban Tales running, the story of what's actually holding that dome up plays as you look across the canal at it.
Once a year, the water closes and the city walks across
The Senate's 1631 decree fixed November 21st — the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin — as the date for Venice's annual procession, and some version of it has run every year since, through the fall of the Republic in 1797, foreign rule, and two world wars. The Doge himself used to lead it on foot; these days it's the Patriarch of Venice, but the route and the date haven't moved. For about a week around that date, a pontoon bridge built from a long row of moored boats, lashed together under a wooden walkway, runs from Campo Santa Maria del Giglio straight across the Grand Canal to the church steps — one of the only days anyone crosses that stretch of water on foot instead of by vaporetto.
Stalls selling candles and torrone, a hard honey-and-almond nougat sold almost nowhere else in Venice outside this one week, line the approach on both banks. Inside, the custom is simple: light a candle, say a word of thanks for health, the salute the church is named for. At home, Venetian families still cook castradina for the occasion — smoked, salt-cured mutton stewed with cabbage, a dish that traces back to the plague years, when fresh meat was scarce and salted meat shipped in from Dalmatia was what there was.
Compare that to Carnevale, Venice's other big festival, wall-to-wall with costumed visitors for two weeks every February. The Salute procession barely registers outside Italy. Most of the people crossing that bridge are locals making a walk their grandparents made, not tourists chasing a photo — one of the few traditions in Venice the city has mostly kept for itself.
A short walk away, on the other side of the Grand Canal, sits the walled island that gave the world the word "ghetto." Between the two, Venice ended up with two very different answers to hardship: one a wall the city built to shut people in, the other a bridge it has rebuilt every November for almost four centuries to let them cross.
The Republic that made the vow doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the plague, the Senate, or almost anyone who remembers exactly why the promise was made. The city keeps building the bridge anyway.
Dorsoduro's quiet waterfront, from the Accademia to the plague church
- 1Ponte dell'AccademiaThe wooden bridge Venice keeps meaning to rebuild in stone
- 2Peggy Guggenheim CollectionAn unfinished palazzo that became one of Europe's best modern art museums
- 3Campo San VioOne of the only squares in Venice that opens straight onto the Grand Canal
- 4Punta della DoganaThe old customs house guarding the mouth of the Grand Canal
- 5Santa Maria della SaluteThis storyThe plague church that gets a bridge of boats once a year
- 6Le ZattereThe waterfront promenade where Venetians actually go to walk
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