 |  |
The Doge's Palace is a gothic palace in Venice. In Italian it is called the Palazzo Ducale di Venezia. The palace was the residence of the Doge of Venice.
Its two most visible facades look towards the Venetian Lagoon and St Mark's Square, or rather the Piazzetta. The use of arcading in the lower stories produces an interesting "gravity-defying" effect. There is also effective use of colour contrasts (unfortunately, the patterns are not well shown in the illustrative photographs accompanying this article...from a distance the colours blur).
The current palace was largely constructed from 1309 to 1424, designed perhaps by Filippo Calendario. It replaced earlier fortified buildings of which relatively little is known. Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon created the Porta della Carta in 1442, a monumental late-gothic gate on the Piazzetta side of the palace. This gate leads to a central courtyard.
The palace was badly damaged by fire in 1574. In the subsequent rebuilding work it was decided to respect the original gothic style, despite the submission of a neo-classical alternative design by Palladio. However, there are some classical features, for example since the sixteenth century the palace has been linked to the prison by the Bridge of Sighs.
As well as being the ducal residence, the palace housed political institutions of the Republic of Venice until the Napoleonic occupation of the city. Venice was ruled by an aristocratic elite, but there was a facility for citizens to submit written complaints at what was known as the Bussola chamber.
 |  |
The Grand Canal (Italian: Canal Grande, Venetian: Canałasso) is the most important canal in Venice, Italy. It forms one of the major water-traffic corridors in the city. Public transport is provided by water buses and private water taxis, but many tourists visit it by gondola.
At one end the canal leads into the lagoon near Santa Lucia railway station and the other end leads into Saint Mark Basin: in between it makes a large S-shape through the central districts ("sestieri") of Venice. It is 3800 m long, 30-90 m wide, with an average depth of five meters.
 |  |
St Mark's Clocktower is a clock tower situated on St Mark's Square in Venice, adjoining the Procuratie Vecchie. It houses the most important clock in the city, St Mark's Clock (alternatively known as the Torre dell'Orologio or the Moors' Clocktower).
It was constructed as a display of Venice's wealth, and as an aid to sailors on the Grand Canal about to depart on a voyage.
The building was designed by Mauro Codussi and constructed between 1496 and 1499. It has five bays, of which the central bay is the widest. This bay incorporates a two-storey gateway, with the large clock face above, topped by a single storey tower with a depiction of a Lion of St Mark against the night sky, while two blackened bronze figures intended as giants but known as the "Moors" stand on top and ring a bell on the hour.
The clock mechanism, dating from 1499 and much restored since then, drives the main clock face, which consists of several concentric dials. The outermost displays the number 1 to 24 in Roman numerals, and a hand embellished with a depiction of the sun indicated the hour. The second dial depicts the twelve signs of the zodiac, picked out, like the inner dials, in gilt on an enamel blue background. The inner dials indicate the phases of the moon and sun.
The mechanism also moves a display above the clockface, where a niche with a depiction of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus lies between two displays: the hour in Roman numerals and the minutes (in multiples of five) in Hindu-Arabic numerals. On Ascension Day, statues of the three kings pass in front of the displays.
Terraces were added to the tower by Giorgio Massari in 1755, but it has otherwise been little altered. Major renovations have obscured the structure behind scaffolding for several years. Now though, this extraordinarily elaborate timepiece is on public show again, in full working order, and delighting visitors and Venetians alike, as it has done for more than 500 years.
The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the National Library of St Mark's, is one of the earliest surviving public manuscript depositories in Italy and holds one of the greatest classical texts collections in the world. The library is named after St Mark, the patron saint of Venice. It is not to be confused with the State Archive of the Republic of Venice, which is housed in a different part of the city.
The library was provided with a building designed by Jacopo Sansovino. The first sixteen arcaded bays of his design were constructed during 1537 to 1553, with work on frescoes and other decorations continuing until 1560. Sansovino died in 1570, but in 1588, Vincenzo Scamozzi undertook the construction of the additional five bays, still to Sansovino's design, which brought the building down to the molo or embankment, next to Sansovino's building for the Venetian mint, the Zecca. One of the early librarians, from 1530, was Pietro Bembo. However, the library stock began to be collected before the construction of the building. For example, the germ of the collections in the library was the gift to the Serenissima of the manuscript collection assembled by Byzantine humanist, scholar, patron and collector, Cardinal Bessarion; he made a gift of his collection on 31 May 1468: some 750 codices in Latin and Greek, to which he added another 250 manuscripts and some printed books (incunabula), constituting the first "public" library open to scholars in Venice. (In 1362 Petrarch's library was donated to Venice but this collection of manuscripts, ancient books, and personal letters was lost or dispersed [1]).
Like the British Library or the Library of Congress at later times, the Biblioteca Marciana profited from a law of 1603 that required that a copy be deposited in the Marciana of all books printed at Venice, the first such law. The Marciana was enriched by the transfer in the late eighteenth century of the collections accumulated in several monasteries, such as SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice and S. Giovanni di Verdara in Padua.
Great additions have been made to the collection from time to time:
- 1589: Melchiorre Guilandino of Marienburg (2.200 printed books);
- 1595: Jacopo Contarini da S. Samuele, delayed until the extinction of the Contarini in the male line, in 1713 (175 mss and 1500 printed books);
- 1619: Girolamo Fabrici d'Acquapendente (13 volume with hand-colored anatomical illustrations);
- 1624: Giacomo Gallicio (20 Greek mss);
- 1734: Gian Battista Recanati (216 mss, among them the codices of the house of Gonzaga) ;
- 1792: Tommaso Giuseppe Farsetti (350 mss and printed books);
- 1794: Amedeo Svajer (more than 340 mss among which is the last will of Marco Polo);
- 1797: Jacopo Nani (over 1000 mss, largely Greek and Eastern)
- 1595: Jacopo Contarini da S. Samuele, delayed until the extinction of the Contarini in the male line, in 1713 (175 mss and 1500 printed books);
With the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the Marciana was enriched by the transfer of manuscripts and books from religious houses that were suppressed under the Napoleonic regime. In 1811 the library was moved to more spacious quarters in the Doge's Palace, where further collections entered:
- 1814: Girolamo Ascanio Molin (2209 fine printed books, 3835 prints and 408 drawings, housed in the Museo Correr for the most part;
- 1843: Girolamo Contarini (906 mss and 4000 printed books);
- 1852: Giovanni Rossi (470 mss and a collection of Venetian operas)
- 1843: Girolamo Contarini (906 mss and 4000 printed books);
In 1904 the collection was moved to Sansovino's Zecca (built 1537-47 as a mint). The Library has since expanded back into its adjacent original quarters and even into sections of the Procuratie Nuove facing Piazza San Marco.
Today, besides about a million printed books, the Biblioteca Marciana contains about 13,000 manuscripts and 2883 incunabula and 24,055 works printed between 1500 and 1600. There are many illuminated manuscripts. Among the irreplaceable treasures are unique scores of operas by Francesco Cavalli and sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti.
 |  |
St Mark's Campanile is the bell tower of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, Italy, located in the square (piazza) of the same name. It is a recognizable symbol of the city.
The tower is 98.6 meters tall, and stands alone in a corner of St Mark's Square, near the front of the basilica. It has a simple form, the bulk of which is a plain brick shaft, 12 meters on a side and 50 meters tall, above which is the arched belfry, housing five bells. The belfry is topped by a cube, alternate faces of which show walking lions and the female representation of Venice (la Giustizia: Justice). The tower is capped by a pyramidal spire, at the top of which sits a golden weathervane in the form of the archangel Gabriel. The campanile reached its present form in 1514. As it stands today, however, the tower is a reconstruction, completed in 1912 after the collapse of 1902.
 |  |
Venice (Italian: Venezia, Venetian: Venesia or Venexia) is a city in northern Italy, the capital of the region Veneto, and has a population of 271,251 (census estimate January 1, 2004). Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area (population 1,600,000). Venice has been known as the "La Dominante", "Serenissima", "Queen of the Adriatic", "City of Water", "City of Bridges", and "The City of Light". It is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.[1]
The city stretches across 118 small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in northeast Italy. The saltwater lagoon stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po (south) and the Piave (north) Rivers. The population estimate of 272,000 inhabitants includes the population of the whole Comune of Venezia; around 62,000 in the historic city of Venice (Centro storico); 176,000 in Terraferma (the Mainland), mostly in the large frazione of Mestre and Marghera; and 31,000 live on other islands in the lagoon.
The Venetian Republic was a major maritime power during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and a staging area for the Crusades and the Battle of Lepanto, as well as a very important center of commerce (especially silk, grain and spice trade) and art in the 13th century up to the end of the 17th century.
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
