Campo Santo Stefano Site Features

The church is entered through a Gothic doorway of the early 15th century, carved in marble and set into a plain brick front -- the most decorated thing about a facade that is otherwise deliberately unremarkable.

The interior is the reason to go in. The nave is roofed with a carena di nave ceiling: a wooden vault built in the shape of an inverted ship's hull, assembled by shipwrights from the Arsenale using the methods they used on boats. Venice built this way because it had shipbuilders rather than stone vaulters, and because a timber roof is far lighter on soft ground than masonry.

The campanile stands apart from the church and leans by as much as two metres. It is among the tallest in the city, and its tilt is not a curiosity but the standard consequence of putting great weight on a mudbank -- the same problem that brought down the tower at Santa Fosca in 1410.

The building was begun around 1294 by Augustinian friars, largely rebuilt in the 14th century and altered again in the early 15th, so the fabric is a sequence of Gothic campaigns rather than a single design.

Inside the church, look up: the wooden ceiling is built in a carena di nave (ship's keel) form, resembling the upturned hull of a ship and built by Venetian shipwrights rather than conventional church carpenters. The freestanding campanile beside the church leans visibly enough to notice from across the square, a rare structural quirk even in a city built on famously unstable ground.

Campo Santo Stefano is one of the largest squares in Venice, in San Marco, sitting between the Accademia Bridge and the route north toward the Rialto -- so almost everyone crossing between Dorsoduro and San Marco passes through it.

Its size is the point. Venice has very few open spaces, and this one is big enough to hold a crowd without becoming one: cafe tables along the edges, the Tommaseo statue in the middle, and enough room left over for children to play football.

For centuries most of it was grass, with a single paved strip called the liston running through it. That strip was where Venetians walked in the evening, and it gave the language andare al liston -- to go for a stroll -- which is still said in the city.

The square's scale also made it a venue. Bull hunts were staged here until 1802, when a spectator stand collapsed and killed several people, ending the practice permanently.

Palaces line it on all sides -- Palazzo Loredan and Palazzo Pisani among them -- and the leaning campanile shows above the rooftops from most points in it.