Not an almanac precisely, but a collection of annual events and important occurrences in Venetian history.
It sometimes seems that saints are revered in inverse proportion to their deeds. It is not clear that Saint Nicholas ever did much of note, other than slip coins into people's shoes – and who hasn't done that? Nonetheless he's the patron Saint of Aberdeen, Russia,...
(June 15th in the Eastern Church, but on this occasion Venice went with the West). In the days of the Republic, one of the five dates on which a state banquet was held, “when the newly-elected members of the Council of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them...
In 1576, with Venice in the grip of one of the worst plagues in its history, the authorities attempted to bribe God to relent, promising as a quid pro quo for deliverence the construction of a magnificent temple to Christ the Redeemer. A site on the Giudecca was...
Not, I think, Saint Marina of Aguas Santas (Marina of Orense), but Margaret of Antioch, whose feast day falls in fact on July 20th in the Roman calendar. She is honoured instead by the Eastern Church, where she is known as Santa Marina, on July 17th, the Venetians, as...
Martial was one of the seven bishops sent out by the third century Pope Fabian to preach the Gospel to the Gauls, who were sufficiently unappreciative to martyr most of them. The best known of the bunch was Saint Denis (Paris), but although the life and deeds of St....
On this day, or rather night, 700 years ago in dim and distant 1310, an attempted coup against the Republic was foiled by a combination of treachery, lack of mobile phones, bad weather and a well-aimed mortar (with which an ancient markswoman, Giustina Rossi, felled...
In the later days of the Republic, impoverished nobles were (modestly) lodged at the public expense in this parish, and were known consequently as 'barnabotti'. "Too proud to work - and lose their patent of nobility - too stupid to play any part in the Government,...
Lady Day, but, more importantly, the traditional day on which Venice was founded, in 421, at midday, supposedly a Friday, as this year. Here is Horatio Brown apropos: 'The Venetian official account always assigned the 25th March 421 as the day on which Venice was...
In Roman Catholic churches, all the candles which will be needed during the coming year are consecrated. In 492 St. Gelasius changed the Roman Pagan festival the Lupercalia to The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. The origin of the Festa delle Marie. At...
He had been British chaplain in Venice 1905-1909 and wrote, with his wife Laura, two worthwhile publications on the city, the Venice volume of the attractive A & C Black Colour Book series, (with the wishy-washy watercolour illustrations that embellish those...
Reuter's terse communiqué read as follows: The Campanile of St. Mark’s Cathedral, 98 metres high (about 318 feet), has just fallen down on to the Piazza. It collapsed where it stood, and is now a heap of ruins. The cathedral and the Doge’s Palace are quite safe. Only...
April 16th, 1846: Domenico Carlo Maria Dragonetti, composer and double bass player, (‘the first great virtuoso’), composer and friend of Haydn and Beethoven, died at his lodgings in Leicester Square in London aged 83. Dragonetti was born in Venice in 1763, the son of...
The internationally renowned neoclassical sculptor died aged 64. Though born on Venetian territory, at Passagno, near Asolo, and receiving his early training in the Serenissima, apprenticed to the sculptor Giuseppe Bernardi from the age of 11 and frequenting the...
Following the Treaty of Vienna, after an exile of eighteen years, the bronze horses of San Marco were returned to Venice from Paris where they had adorned the Arc du Carousel (on which replicas now prance, with behind them a chariot originally intended to contain...
Following the death of Doge Paolo Renier on 13th February, 1789, Lodovico Manin was elected 120th (and last) Doge. On being elected, Manin burst into tears and fainted. When his rival for the Dogeship, Pietro Gradenigo heard of Manin’s election he said, prophetically...
Alessandro Marcello, nobleman, dilettante, mathematician, poet, philosopher and composer, dies in Padua, aged 77. Overshadowed by junior contemporaries Antonio Vivaldi and his own younger brother Benedetto, both of whom he outlived, he was nonetheless a significant...
