Campo San Salvador Site Features

The church of San Salvador hides an unusual plan behind a conventional front. Giorgio Spavento's design of about 1508 sets three square, domed bays in a row down the nave, each with a smaller domed bay between -- so the interior is not a single hall but a sequence of centralised spaces strung together. It takes the Byzantine idea behind St Mark's and rebuilds it in Renaissance geometry, which no other church in the city does.

Spavento died in 1509, a year after starting. Tullio Lombardo carried the work on and Vincenzo Scamozzi took it further, and the three domes were built over the following decades without abandoning the original scheme.

The facade came much later and from a different world: Giuseppe Sardi added it in 1663 in full Baroque, paid for by a private bequest, and it makes no attempt to express the plan behind it. A visitor reading the front would not guess at the domes.

The church holds Titian's Annunciation and Transfiguration, the funerary monument of Caterina Cornaro -- Queen of Cyprus, who abdicated in Venice's favour -- and the tombs of three doges. On the same square stands the Scuola Grande di San Teodoro, a separate confraternity building with its own 17th-century facade.

Look for the marble column that replaced the historic fig tree in 1898, marking where travelers once tied their horses; the cannonball lodged in a facade column from the 1849 Austrian bombardment; and, inside the church, Titian's Annunciation and Transfiguration alongside the tomb of Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian noblewoman who once ruled as Queen of Cyprus.

Campo San Salvador sits on the Mercerie, the chain of narrow shopping streets running between the Rialto Bridge and St Mark's Square -- the single busiest walking corridor in Venice.

The campo is a widening in that corridor rather than a destination off it. Everyone walking between the city's two most visited points passes through, which is why the church door is stepped past by tens of thousands of people who never register that there is a church there.

That position is very old. The 1287 decree banning horses from the Merceria required riders coming from the Rialto to leave their animals here and continue on foot -- so this square has been the point where the through route changes character for more than seven centuries.

Its enclosure is tight: the church on one side, the Scuola Grande di San Teodoro beside it, shops around the rest, and no canal frontage at all. It is a stone room in the middle of a shopping street.

Stepping inside the church is the sharpest contrast available in central Venice -- from the densest pedestrian crush in the city into three quiet domes, across a threshold.