Christopher Howse reports on a pilgrimage that’s undertaken every November in Venice – by believers and unbelievers.
A phalanx of Venetians advanced over the bridge of boats, their red, blue and black umbrellas raised against a passing shower. From the far side of the Grand Canal they looked like a testudo, the ancient Roman military formation for storming a gateway under a shelter of shields.
The good-natured jostling crowd was set on one target – to visit the monumental domed church of the Salute on its great annual feast on November 21. It was for this that the temporary bridge had been set up, as it has been each year since 1631, when Venice was freed from a plague.
The bridge is quite a structure, spanning 264ft from the side of the Gritti Place Hotel over the Grand Canal to a narrow lane beside the medieval church of San Gregorio. It stays in place for three days, resting on eight barges tethered to great stakes with pointed tops like giant sharpened pencils. It arches up so that, under the middle, the vaporetti, the chugging water buses, can just squeeze through. They’re quite exciting to watch from above, for they seem to approach at fearless speed, hitting the gap like a train entering a tunnel.
Everything is turned upside down on the feast of the Madonna della Salute. The Venetians, not conspicuously pious in their daily demeanour, all make a point of a visit. “You don’t have to be a believer,” said a man in a smart overcoat and Wellingtons near St Mark’s. “It’s a thing for everyone in Venice.”
And so it really seems. An English or a German voice is scarcely heard in the throng. “Que bella la campana,” a woman in fur says to her companion as the bell rings echoing in the narrow lane, where, for a moment, there is an impasse as umbrellas lock together at a tiny crossroads. Then suddenly, over a little wooden footbridge, the world opens out into the wide fondamento, the quayside beside the vast baroque masterpiece by Baldassare Longhena.
Booths nailed together from canvas and wood sell 2ft-long candles at €5 (£4.50) apiece – not bad value in this city where simply existing sometimes feels like keeping a taxi waiting with the meter running. From the waterside it is possible to see through the velvet-draped open doorway right into the candlelit church and as far as the icon of the Madonna di San Tito, which stands above the high altar.
The whole church of the Salute – its vast stone volutes absurdly like Danish pastries buttressing the rotunda beset by saintly statues, with its Corinthian columns, twin domes, and half-dozen side chapels – was built just for this day each year. It was built for a grand procession and an ant-stream of pilgrims.
At the top of the 16 wide steps to the grand entrance you can smell the wax, hot wax. Hundreds of candles in ranks leaning inwards, planted on metal stands the size of double beds, suck up air in a blaze of convection. A sort of verger – a black man in blue overalls speckled with wax – accepts candles from pilgrims and puts them in place to burn away.
The chequered floor of the round church is invisible beneath a press of pilgrims. On this day, chosen because it is the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, Mass is said every hour on the hour from six in the morning until eight at night. The priest goes about his business undeterred by the constant flow of people past the altar, to say their prayers and make token offerings behind it, in a niche beneath the icon, which is covered with a festal silver mounting so that only the solemn, thoughtful face of the Mother and the round face of the Child look out over the restless crowd.
I would say that only those capable of imperturbable concentration could pay undistracted attention to the liturgy on a day like this. Perhaps it is the very act of coming here that is the point. The Gazzettino, the regional newspaper, was full of warnings of disaster because of the forecast high tides: the acqua alta, it predicted, would prevent the No 2 vaporetto from getting under the bridge by the railway station and would leave pedestrians wallowing in floodwater.
In the event, the high tide did not prevent the bishop from arriving for the High Mass attended by the civic authorities (many of them, no doubt, as unbelieving as the beast of the field, but determined to be there).
When the Salute was built, the fear was not flood but plague. Bubonic plague had raged through the putrid summer of 1629. By April 1630, the Patriarch of Venice declared that devotions should be held in six churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary, imploring her intercession to halt the deadly epidemic. In the autumn of that year, the worldly wise Venetian senate, for all its pomp and Machiavellian craft, resolved to appeal to heavenly aid. A church, it decided, should be built and dedicated to Santa Maria della Salute, Our Lady of Health. The senate declared that a procession would be held to the church annually. And so it was.
The site for the new church was a commanding one, at the mouth of the Grand Canal. It is impossible now to picture Venice without the high dome of the Salute, as every great painter of the city from Canaletto to Turner has depicted it. The church formed a leitmotif in the pictures that featured in the recent exhibition at the National Gallery in London.
But how do you build a vast, heavy stone edifice in a lagoon of shifting silt? The answer lies in the substratum of Venice, firm clay beneath the mud. Palaces and churches rest on wooden piles driven into the clay. For the Salute, 1,156,657 long stakes were banged into place. It was an astonishing feat that was finished within two years of the commission being made.
Even before the stone church began to rise, the Venetian authorities began to fulfil their promise. The first procession, to lay the foundation stone, on April 1 1631, brought one of the city’s most treasured possessions to the site. This was the icon known as the Madonna Nikopeia.
This icon of the Virgin Mary holding the child Jesus was said, in those days, to have been painted by St Luke himself. Certainly it had come from Constantinople, with other treasures plundered in the terrible conquest of 1204, led by the ferocious nonagenarian Doge Enrico Dandolo. The name Nikopeia means “Worker of Victories”. Had not the Venetians triumphed over the Turks in the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571? Now they wanted a heavenly victory over the plague.
More charming and approachable than the Madonna di San Tito, the Madonna Nikopeia today resides in the chapel of the north transept of St Mark’s, where Mass is said quietly every morning while the gum-chewing crocodiles of tourists mill around their circuit of the basilica. The icon is framed in ancient enamels, but the jewelled plates of precious metal that once masked the figures have been removed, revealing the Virgin’s simple mantle of deep blue, marked with four small crosses in gold leaf.
For the first procession to the Salute, this icon was carried from the high altar of St Mark’s by four priests while the choir (then under the direction of Claudio Monteverdi) sang a litany. The outdoor route was marked by canopies of white cloth on tall stakes, with periodic triumphal arches, past the 10th-century church of San Moise (not yet rebuilt as the Baroque drawing-room it now resembles), past the old Giustinian palazzo and across a bridge of boats. A painting by the 17th-century artist Luca Carlevaris shows what this would have been like – a wooden walkway resting on wooden barges, with the same red fabric wrappings round the handrail that are used today.
At the site of the Salute that day in 1631, the Venetians, with all the resourceful ingenuity of a maritime power, had run up a temporary wooden church large enough to shelter the solemn procession of clergy and state officials, and the Patriarch and his entourage, who were waiting for them. There was in those days a sharp rivalry between the Patriarch, whose cathedral of St Peter’s lay eastwards beyond the Arsenale, and the authorities of St Mark’s, which was still technically, for all its grandeur, no more than the chapel of the Doge’s palace.
There, among the painted columns of the wooden church, the icon of the Madonna Nikopeia was placed by the altar, the foundation stone was blessed and the Doge and Signoria knelt as a solemn High Mass was sung. It did the trick. On November 21 1631, the patronal day of the Salute, Venice was officially proclaimed to have been delivered from the plague.
The church of the Salute remains perfectly sited halfway between St Mark’s and Palladio’s church of the Redentore on the far island of the Giudecca. That, too, was built as the consequence of a plague, in the 1570s, when a quarter or more of the Venetian population perished.
So, once a year, the Salute can be viewed from a new angle. Wait until the crowds have subsided, and walk across the bridge of boats by night. That is the way to see it, when the tourists have gone and you and your beloved saunter back to the hotel from a quiet dinner upstairs at Quadri’s in St Mark’s Square, where a few hours earlier they had been mopping out the morning floods from the terrazzo of the ground-floor coffee shop.
The sad Africans in the street hawk the useless toy of the moment – last year a luminescent projectile that parachutes back down to earth – but there are no cars, no fear of muggers, no last train to catch. The moon rises above the basin of St Mark’s, where the water seems like lapped glass, and, between the moon and the dome of the Salute, Venus burns with a cold fierceness.
- Christopher Howse travelled with Citalia (0844 4151956; www.citalia.com), which offers three nights’ b & b in November in a premium deluxe room at the five-star Hotel Danieli from £459 per person, based on two sharing, with return flight on British Airways from Gatwick.
- Other hotels are available, such as the four-star Bonvechiati, from £249, also for three nights with flights. Prices do not include transport to and from the airport, which is quickest and cheapest by bus at €3 (£2.70) each, but more atmospheric by water taxi (€100/£90 per taxi).
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