Venice doesn’t just tell its astonishing history through books and paintings and music. It’s there in the streets too, if you just stop to look. Let’s take a walk around a quiet part of Cannaregio and I’ll show you an example many often miss.

The ‘Moorish’ statues

Head to Campo dei Mori and you may find a few people hanging around this statue and touching its iron nose.

That’s Sior Antonio Rioba, the most famous of the four figures built into the walls in this area, distinguished by that iron nose that replaced his original stone one sometime in the 19th century. Rub it, tradition says, and you’ll have luck. These visitors from India had a good old rub before moving on.

Rioba was, for centuries, Venice’s answer to Rome’s most famous talking statue Pasquino — a spot where anonymous satirical notes aimed at the powerful would appear, tucked into his stone folds or read aloud by whoever found them. You can still see it right by Piazza Navona today, along with some contemporary diatribes. Rioba and his two stone companions in the same campo — Sandi and Afani — are traditionally identified as the three Mastelli brothers, merchants who arrived in Venice from the Peloponnese.

No, they’re not from North Africa

The brothers were nicknamed “Mori” because they came from Morea — the old name for the Peloponnese — not because of their appearance. A Marciana Library chronicle (Codice 27) dates their arrival precisely: 1112, fleeing civil unrest at home with considerable wealth, which they used to build the palazzo that still stands on the campo.

The statues themselves came later — probably carved in the late 13th or early 14th century, nearly two hundred years after the brothers actually arrived.

Palazzo Mastelli del Cammello

A few steps away, the family’s palazzo reveals the other half of its story: a camel in bas-relief, carved into the façade facing the water.

One legend holds that the brothers’ own camel was petrified alongside them. A gentler, more romantic version claims a wealthy Eastern merchant had it carved so a woman he loved might recognise the house, should she ever come looking for him. Either way, Venetians have long known this simply as the “House of the Camel.”

The uglier version of the Mastelli story — the one Alberto Toso Fei tells in Misteri della Laguna e racconti di streghe — has the brothers as fine-fabric merchants who made a habit of cheating their customers, until they picked the wrong one: a devout Venetian widow who, once defrauded, prayed to Mary Magdalene for justice. The saint, in the guise of an ordinary buyer, returned to trade with them — and turned them, and by some tellings their camel too, to stone on the spot.

The fourth statue, and Tintoretto’s doorstep

Round the corner, on the Fondamenta dei Mori, is the detail most visitors miss entirely: a fourth statue, set into the wall of what later became Tintoretto’s house.

Toso Fei is one of the few writers who gives this one a name — el Moro Mambrun — distinct from the three brothers themselves; other tellings call him their servant.

And on to Madonna dell’Orto

While in the area you shouldn’t miss the church Tintoretto is buried in.

It’s a minute’s walk from the campo, and a delightful, peaceful location to end this little stroll around one of Venice’s many fantastic tales, from petrified merchants and their camel to the brilliant painter who lived and worked in their shadow for most of his life.

If you want to know more of this side of the city, Alberto Toso Fei is your author, and has some works translated into English which are well worth a read. I’m delighted to say he is one of the team working on Venice Noir too so if you come to join the festival in November you’ll have the chance of hearing him talk about the city he knows so well, and where his family connections go back centuries. Worth the trip alone.

We conclude Venice Noir with our award to a writer we feel has made a significant contribution to the field of crime and thriller writing. Last year our first prize went, deservedly, to Ian Rankin who you can see testing the sharpness of it below…

Yes, it was a stunning piece of glass sculpture made by Barovier & Toso, one of Murano’s most famous furnaces. This year, thanks to the efforts of Marco Vidal, our champion on the ground in Venice alongside his wife Silvia Bandolin, we have another unique sculpture, one with a name: Lama d’Ombra — Blade of Shadow.

The piece is the work of Andrea Morucchio, an artist Marco has collaborated with for years and who, he says, never fails to come back with something extraordinary. A few months ago Marco asked him to create the trophy that will be presented to the Noir Author of the Year — the prize that sits at the heart of everything the festival stands for.

‘What he’s made is, without exaggeration, a showstopper,’ Marco says proudly.

A blade cut from glass and shadow

Marco again, ‘Lama d’Ombra marks Morucchio’s return to sculpture in glass, reworking a form that sits at the very origins of his artistic research. It’s a vertical, edged presence — a blade, unmistakably — rendered in a red so deep it reads almost as blood, rising from a base of blackened, charred-looking wood.

‘The effect is deliberately unsettling. Beauty and unease sit side by side in the same object; so do attraction and threat. That tension is the whole point. Lama d’Ombra was conceived specifically as the official award of Venice Noir Festival 2026, and it translates the genre’s preoccupations — mystery, darkness, danger, revelation — into a single physical gesture: a luminous blade that cuts through the dark, incises it, and drags what it finds there into the light. It’s hard to think of a more fitting image for a noir prize.’

Made in a Murano furnace

And here’s a short video showing its creation.

The glasswork was produced in collaboration with Roberto Beltrami of Wave Murano Glass, whose furnace turned Morucchio’s design into the piece’s blood-red blade. The wooden base — that black, seemingly carbonised surface the glass rises from — is the work of Saverio Pastor, a Venetian ebanista (cabinetmaker) whose craftsmanship gives the sculpture its grounding weight. The project also had support from CNA Artigiani e PMI Metropolitana Venezia, the local artisans’ association.

It’s the kind of piece that could only really come from Venice — glassworking traditions that go back centuries, put to entirely new, unsettling use.

Where to see it

Lama d’Ombra will be presented as part of Venice Glass Week, at the Libreria Studium in San Marco. If you’re in Venice, it will be on display there from 12 to 20 September — well worth a detour if you want to see it up close before it’s handed over.

The prize itself will be awarded to Venice Noir’s author of the year on 15 November 2026 in the Ridotto of the Hotel Monaco, once the casino Casanova used to frequent.

Who, I wonder, will go home with the prize this year?