San Giorgio Maggiore Site Features

Palladio's church facade applies the proportions of a classical temple front to a Christian church, a solution he refined here after experimenting with it at Venice's Church of the Redentore. The interior is equally restrained: a bright, unadorned nave in white stone and stucco, designed to focus attention on light and proportion rather than surface decoration.

The campanile (bell tower), rebuilt in the 18th century after an earlier tower collapsed, rises beside the church and is open to visitors by elevator -- unlike the stair climb required at St. Mark's own campanile across the water.

Inside the church, Tintoretto's Last Supper and The Jews in the Desert, both painted in the final years of his life, hang among the most significant late works by the artist anywhere in Venice. The choir stalls behind the altar are carved with scenes from the life of St. Benedict.

San Giorgio Maggiore is its own island, separated from the city by about three hundred metres of open water at the point where the Grand Canal, the Giudecca Canal and the Bacino di San Marco all meet.

That isolation is the whole design. Palladio placed a bright white Istrian stone facade at the one spot where it would be seen head-on across open water from the Piazzetta, with nothing in front of it and nothing crowding it -- the opposite condition to every other church in Venice, which is met at close range from a calle or a campo.

The view back is the reason most people come. From the campanile the city reads as a plan rather than a maze: the Piazzetta and the Doge's Palace directly opposite, the Giudecca stretching west, the Lido closing the horizon, and -- unlike from the Campanile in the square itself -- St Mark's and its own bell tower visible in the frame.

The rest of the island is not a public landscape. Behind the church the Benedictine cloisters and gardens belong to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and are seen on its own guided tours, including an open-air Teatro Verde and a garden maze.