David Hewson

The Ghosts of Campo Santa Margherita

Religious artefact, Campo Santa Margherita, Venice

When I first came to Campo Santa Margherita thirty years ago, there were just a couple of bars and restaurants and the place was dead by nine o’clock. Today it’s one of the busiest patches of nightlife in Venice, thronged with students and spritz-drinkers until the small hours. But its religious past is still there, if you know where to look. Proof that Venice’s past is always around if you care to look.

The square takes its name from the Chiesa di Santa Margherita, a church so old its founding is half legend — tradition credits a Venetian named Geniano Busignaco with building it under Doge Pietro Tradonico, with consecration following in 853. Tradonico, by the way, was one of the few Doges to be murdered while in office, attacked after leaving vespers in San Zaccaria. For centuries Santa Margherita was a pieve, a parish church with its own baptismal rights and a small chapter of clergy. Today, opposite the popular student bar Do Draghi, it’s the auditorium of Ca’ Foscari and hosts lectures instead of Mass.

Napoleon’s suppression of Venice’s religious institutions caught up with it in 1810. The church was deconsecrated, its parish folded into the Carmini nearby, and the building began a strange second life — tobacco warehouse, marble store for demolished churches, sculptor’s studio, evangelical chapel, union hall, and finally, from 1921 to 1977, a cinema known as Cinema Santa Margherita, nicknamed el vecio — the old one — to distinguish it from the separate Cinema Moderno further along the campo. Ca’ Foscari University bought the building in 1987, and after a long restoration the auditorium finally opened in 1994, which is what it remains today.

Look up at the campo’s north end and you’ll still see the bell tower — truncated, its top removed as unsafe in 1808, but the original portal and two arrow-slit windows survive intact.

Bisina’s cell

In 1330, a Venetian woman named Bisina — daughter of a local craftsman — negotiated with the church’s clergy, gathered in chapter, to build a hermitage against the sacristy wall. With the bishop’s blessing, she walled herself into it for life, connected to the church only by a narrow passage leading up to the dome, where a small window let her watch the Mass being said below.

She wasn’t an eccentric one-off. Venice hosted centuries of these voluntary recluses — women mostly who negotiated their own terms of enclosure with local clergy and lived out penitential lives built into the fabric of parish churches across the city. Records of Venetian recluses persist into the sixteenth century, nearly two hundred years after Bisina’s hermitage was built. Nothing of her cell survives today — the church was rebuilt from the foundations in 1687 and gutted again for the cinema conversion — but the negotiation itself, a craftsman’s daughter striking a deal with a chapter of priests to wall herself in a few paces from where a happy Spritz crowd now drink into the small hours in the street, is as good a measure as any of how different this campo’s nights used to be. Though Bisina did negotiate one night on the town for herself — on the night before Ascension she was allowed to leave her cell to gain indulgence at San Marco.

Hiding in plain sight

One ancient trace of the past does survive, buried under decades of cinema seating. A vault fresco by Antonio Zanchi, showing the martyrdom of St Margaret, was simply covered with cloth when the church became a picture house in the 1920s rather than destroyed. When Ca’ Foscari restored the building in the 1990s, they uncovered and restored it — so somewhere above the students filing into lectures, a seventeenth-century image of the campo’s patron saint still looks down.

The religious communities of Santa Margherita may be long gone. But you can still see plenty of traces of them on the walls in the area, Here are a few I spotted on a brief walk.