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.