Campo San Salvador Historical Timeline

Origins

According to tradition, the church of San Salvador was founded as early as 638, at the urging of the bishop San Magno, by the Carosii and Gattolosi families. Its original floor is said to have been laid with iron grates over running water, in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Turning points

On February 29, 1287, Venetian authorities banned riding horses through the nearby Merceria because of the crowds it caused. Travelers coming from Rialto were required to leave their horses in Campo San Salvador, tying them to a wooden post -- and later to a fig tree -- beside a deep well used to water them, before continuing on foot toward the Piazza. A marble column replaced that fig tree in 1898.

Influential people

The current church was rebuilt starting around 1508, designed by Giorgio Spavento; after his death the following year, Tullio Lombardo and later Vincenzo Scamozzi carried the work forward, with the facade finally added in 1663 by Giuseppe Sardi. The church now holds Titian's Annunciation and Transfiguration, along with the funerary monument of Caterina Cornaro, the former Queen of Cyprus, and the tombs of three Venetian doges.

Cultural evolution

Carnival in this square turned genuinely violent on at least two recorded occasions. On Maundy Thursday in 1579, a masked assailant struck Marco Giustinian, a member of the Council of Ten, with a fatal head wound. In 1602, again during Carnival, Nicolo Moro -- son of Santo Moro -- was killed along with three other patricians while trying to stop the forced abduction of a young woman.

Present-day significance

A cannonball still sits embedded in the base of a column on the church's facade, a relic of the Austrian bombardment that ended Daniele Manin's short-lived Venetian republic in 1849 -- a quieter, more permanent reminder of Venetian history than the crowds passing through the square each day ever notice.