The Queen of Venice

Venice is the Queen of the Seas. But does Venice herself have a queen? Yes, she does. When you inch from the Rialto toward San Marco in the narrow passages, and, next to the church of San Zulian, look down from Ponte dei Bareteri, you read the street name Fondamenta Morosini della Regina – the Queen Morosini’s Quay.



The Morosini family is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most prestigious ones in Venice. They belonged to those twelve families, called “apostolic” because of their number, who first fled from Attila to the lagoons, and who participated in the election of Doge Paoluccio Anafesto (697-717). During the Serenissima’s existence, they gave four doges, four dogaresse (doge-wives) and twenty-six procurators.

“Die Herzogin von Venedig”, that is, the dogaressa of Venice. “Look carefully at this picture if you want to know, how luxuriously a princess is dressed in Venice, in Italian land, that only a few people know. In German land we do not find such a richly dressed lady.” Jost Amman’s woodcut in Im Frauwenzimmer Wirt vermeldt von allerley schönen Kleidungen vnnd Trachten der Weiber (In the boudoir. About all the beautiful ladies’ clothes and attires in the world), Nuremberg, 1586.

However, one of the members of the Morosini family rose to an even higher rank. The blonde prince virtually rode into the life of Tomasina Morosini on a white horse – or perhaps on a white gondola –, and thus she became the queen of Hungary. How did this happen?

“When King Andrew II, father of King Bela IV and Prince Kalman, after the death or rather the assassionation of his first wife, crossed the sea to the Holy Land, to victoriously fight for the Lord’s tomb, and he was returning home with glory and honor, he stopped in Italy, where he was received with great hospitality by the Marquis of Este. The Marquis, having learned that the King was a widow, presented him his daughter, of a great beauty. And the King, seeing that she was beautiful and of charming appearance, and since he wanted to find a new wife anyway, married her on the same day, and brought her to Hungary.

After the death of King Andrew, this lady, while preparing to return to her parents, summoned the magnates, bishops and archbishops of Hungary, and showed them with obvious signs that she was pregnant with the King’s child. Then she returned to their estate in Este. There, in the house of her father she gave birth to a boy, who was named in baptism Stephen. […] Stephen went to Venice. There, one of the wealthier and richer citizens, having heard and received proofs that he was the son of the King of Hungary, married him to his daughter. That woman gave birth to a son, who was named Andrew, after his grandfather’s name.”

The above narrative of the Chronicon Pictum (1358) needs to be corrected in several details, but it does not change much in the essence of the story. Andrew II led a campaign of the Holy Land not on this occasion (1234), but some fifteen years earlier, in 1217-1218. After his first wife, Gertrude, assassinated by the barons of Hungary, he had had a second one by this time, Jolanta, daughter of Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre and Namour. He got to know his third wife, Beatrix of Este in 1233, shortly after Jolanta’s death, during his pilgrimate to Italy, and married her in 1234 in Hungary. And finally, Beatrix not simply “returned”, but fled back to Este. Andrew’s older sons, the future King Bela IV and Prince Kalman were opposed from the beginning to the new marriage of their sixty-year-old father, and looked suspicious on the pregnancy of his young wife, rumouring that the real father was the baron Dénes of Apold. After the death of Andrew II on 21 September 1235, they put Beatrix under arrest. She, however, escaped to Germany, and in Marburg gave birth to her son, Stephen the Posthumous.

Adventurous is the fate of exiled princes. I wonder why no TV series or historical novel was written about the life of Prince Stephen. How was it to be a pretender to a royal throne, to traverse cities and principalities with this card, obtain allies, court to heiresses, put a life on everything or nothing?

Prince Stephen grew up in Este, traveled through Spain and the princely courts of the Po plain, Ferrara, Verona, Ravenna, and finally he settled in Venice. Here he won the hand of the daughter of the patrician Michele Morosini, obviously not without the consent of the Grand Council of Venice, who knew how useful a Venetian-friendly Hungarian king would be in a situation where the Serenissima and Hungary were fighting for Dalmatia. Here was born, around 1265, their son Andrew, who, due to the fortunate collusion of the circumstances, and against all odds, came to the Hungarian throne in 1290. In fact, his predecessor, Ladislas IV, Bela IV’s grandson, spent his time in the tents of her Cuman mistresses, and was abhorred of his wife, Anjou Isabel of Naples, so he died without a legal heir. At this time the Hungarian barons turn to the “last golden branch” of the Árpád dynasty, as he is called in his necrolog of 1303, forgotten in Venice. Andrew was brought to Hungary, and crowned king on 23 July 1290.

Two commissioners of Lodomér, Archbishop of Esztergom, bring Prince Andrew to Hungary. Chronicon Pictum, 1358

The haste and the suppression of the doubts concerning the prince’s illegitimate origin were also due to the fact that there was another pretender to the throne of Hungary. Ladislas IV’s sister, Mary was married to the same Anjou family of Naples, from where Ladislas’ wife Isabel came. Her son, Anjou Charles Martell demanded the Hungarian crown on maternal lineage, and his claim was also supported by the Pope. However, the Hungarian barons did not miss a strong ruler of foreign origin, neither an increased influence of the Pope in Hungary. Only the son of Charles Martell, Charles Robert will seize the throne of Hungary in 1308, after the barons, following the death of Andrew III in 1301, tried two other kings of their own choice. No wonder, that under the Hungarian Angevin kings – Charles Robert (1308-1342) and his son Louis (1342-1382), the memory of Andrew III became increasingly negative. After some time he was openly considered illegitimate, and his diplomas were only accepted if Charles Robert also confirmed them.

Silver denar of Andrew III, 1290-1301

But back to Venice. Andrew was still a minor when his father, Prince Stephen the Posthumous died. His mother’s brother, Albertino Morosini assumed his guardianship. Shortly after he went to Hungary in 1290, his mother and uncle followed him at the head of an official Venetian delegation, to congratulate him on his election as king, and to find a definitive solution – of course to the benefit of Venice – to the Dalmatian question. Andrew appointed his mother Princess of Slavonia, and included his uncle into the Hungarian nobility, making him also his heir in 12900. However, after his death in 1301, the Hungarian estates of his mother and uncle were confiscated, and they returned to Venice. According to Donato Contarini’s Cronaca veneta sino al 1433 (Cod. 6260, fol. 106v.), preserved in the Nationalbibliothek of Vienna, they built a house near the church of San Zulian, and the queen lived there until her death in 1311:

“…Andreas nepote de lo dicto messer Albertin morì et non laso nisun eriede et conuene lo regno uiolentemente in man de realli tirani e prese per maior partido messer Albertin de recondur la sorela et la sua persona a Veniexia con quelle solamente perche la roba li fu tolta et venuto a Veniexia lo dicto messer Albertin el qual era spendidissimo et de degno prosepia esendo la sorela stata regina per honor suo et de la casa sua el feze edificar una posesion in S. Zulian in la ruga driedo le case del monastier de S. Zorzi avanti che se ariva al ponte de le balote et lì abitò la dicta regina in fina che quella uisse et uegniva ciamada quela corte de la regina et cusì se ciamo fino al presente zorno…”

“…Andrew, the nephew of said Messer Albertin, died without heir, and his country came into the hands of tyrant kings. Thus, the main concern of Messer Albertin was to lead his sister and himself without any harm back to Venice, since all their estates were confiscated. In Venice, Messer Albertin, who was generous and very proud, since his sister was a queen, built a house to the glory of his family and of himself in the parish of San Zulian, in the street behind the houses of the Saint George Monastery, before the Ponte de le Balote. The Queen lived there until the end of her life, and that house has been called to this day the Queen’s Courtyard…”

A relief of Saint George in the square of the church of San Zulian, at the beginning of the former houses of the Saint George Monastery. The Ponte de le Balote was a wooden bridge until 1725, when it was rebuilt of Istrian stone. Its name comes from the ballotte, the linen ballots used to the election of the doges and other officials, produced in the neighboring Calle de le Balote. The courtyard opening from Fondamenta Morosini della Regina bears the name of Tramontin only since 1743, after the ivory workshop of Zuane Tramontin opened here (under the sign of the Two Elephants); earlier, it might have been the Queen’s Courtyard.

This is the house of the Morosini Queen, who was forced to flee from Attila’s country to the land of the Venetians forced by Attila to the lagoons. Perhaps the oldest house of the world that is still standing today, which has a Hungarian connection.

Attila, the scourge of God. 15th-century bronze medal (Budapest, National Museum), and its copy in the above cited Viennese manuscript of Donato Contarini’s Cronaca veneta sino al 1433.

View from the Fondamenta Morosini della Regina toward the Armenian church of the Holy Cross

In the stonemasons’ yard

The Sotoportego del Tagiapiera, the Gateway and Courtyard of the Stonemasons in Venice, opens with two elegant neo-classical columns from the Campielo del Sol, the Little Square of the Sun, which in the Middle Ages was called Campielo de la Scoazera, the Square of the Refuse Dump. In fact, since the 15th century here was the walled dumping-ground of the Rialto quarter, from where the burchieri, the freight haulers, on behalf of the Magistrato alle Acque, regularly carried the garbage out of the city on gondolas. In 1617, the refuse dump was ended, the walls pulled down, and later the transport route of the gondolas, the Rio Terà San Silvestro – Rio Terà Sant’Aponal channel also filled (this is referred to by the word Terà = terrato, buried) and converted into a pedestrian road. Thereby the stonemasons’ yard also became accessible by land. Nevertheless they continued to bring here through the back gate, along Rio de le Becarie, the Istrian stone and carry away the stone carvings intended to decorate the city’s many buildings.


In Venice they begin to massively build in stone instead of wood in the 14th century. Then in 1307 they founded the stonemasons guild, whose scuola, the seat of their religious and corporate life, was on the top floor of the three-level building next to the nearby church of Sant’Aponal. This is recalled in the relief dated 1603 with the inscription “SCOLA DEL TAGIAPIERA”, the Scuola of the Stonemasons, and with the figures of the Quattro Santi Coronati, that is the four Christian stonemasons of ancient Rome, crowned with the wreath of martyrs. The first depiction of the stonemasons yard survived from 1545 in a manuscript.


I got this far in my lecture to the group, when two young men, who were talking in front of one of the courtyard’s workshops, ask me with a smile: “What is so interesting in this yard?” “That this was the first stonemason yard of Venice,” I reply. And that it is very nice anyway. The whole court, the pillars, the blacksmith’s work, the knockers,” I point at the door behind them. “Yes, now a blacksmith works here,” says one of them. “But earlier there was a carpenter’s workshop there, that of my grandfather. Back there, through the riverside gate they brought in the raw wood from the boats, there they unloaded it in the courtyard, here he processed it and made tables and cabinets out of it.

“Where do you come from?” the other asks. “From Hungary.” “Oh yes? Do you know that the Serenissima and Hungary fought for a long time for Dalmatia, until it passed to Venice?” he asks proudly. “Of course. And do you know,” I riposte, “where the agreement about it was signed between the two states?” “No.” “Well, across the street, in the church of San Silvestro, in 1409.” “Seriously?” they asks in astonishment. “We have grown up here, but never heard about it.” “Yes, there’s a plaque on the wall of the church,” I say. Having spoken of it, we go there with the group, so they can also see, after the previous one, this second Hungarian memorial place in Venice.

“On 9 July 1409 was signed in this church the document by which the Kingdom of Hungary renounced all rights over Zara and Dalmatia in favor of Venice, thus consolidating for centuries the ancient ties between Dalmatia and Venice. Erected by the Dalmatian Society of the History of the Homeland on 29 November 2013.”

Dissolving: From sea to sea

Bird in Byzantine ornamental frame. Venice, St. Mark’s Square, 12-13th century

Bird in Armenian ornamental frame. Venice, St. Lazarus Island, Armenian monastery, MS 1159, 12-13th century

Bombs in Venice

The Albrizzi Palace, where, in the early 19th century, the Corfu-born Greek Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi – Ελισάβετ Θεοτόκη – maintained a famous literary salon, Venice’s most prestigious, visited by Goethe, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, stands in an aristocratic spendid isolation in the heart of Venice, at the corner of the Rialto. On three sides it is surrounded by rivers, Rio San Cassan, Rio de la Misericordia and Rio San Aponal, and once, there was even a river on the fourth side, the Rio de le Carampane, until it was covered and converted into a street named Rio Terà de le Carampane, the Buried Carampane River, during the urban planning of 1864-1865. This is when the palace come into contact by land with another block of houses, which lay in similar splendid isolation, and with which for centuries it would not have wished the slightest relationship whatsoever: the Carampane, Venice’s red light district. This latter quarter was established by the Venetian Council in the early 14th century, with the aim of bringing the courtesans and their mainly foreign clients more under control. As the Council’s main worry was homosexuality, spread by Levantine merchants, to balance it, they permitted ladies to put their charms on public display on the Ponte delle Tete, the Bridge of Tits, which leads northwest from the quarter, and to offer body care services on the opposite Fondamenta de la Stua, the Quay of Baths.


After 1819, the isolation of the Albrizzi Palace was also compromised by another bridge, leading over the river parallel to the Ponte delle Tete, but at the the second floor level, to one of Venice’s largest walled private gardens, which came under the family’s ownership that year. Before it was a garden, there was a theater, the Teatro San Cassiano, Europe’s first opera house, opened in 1637, for whom its first director, Francesco Cavalli wrote most of his operas. The theater was closed in 1807 during the Napoleonic occupation, and demolished in 1812. Today only the name of the Calle de la Comedia, leading to it, and of the Corte del Teatro, opening before it, points to its previous function. In Venice, the memory of street names goes back many centuries.


Che città, che costumi, che gente sfacciata ed insolente! (What a city, what morals, what arrogant and insolent people!) Francesco Cavalli: L’Ormindo, atto 2, scena 1. Christina Pluhar, L’Arpeggiata, 2015

Above: The rear facade of the Albrizzi Palace (to the left) and the bridge leading over to the garden, seen from the Ponte delle Tete. Below: the facade (to the right) and the bridge, and a bit farther the Ponte delle Tete, seen from the opposite side. Photograph by Carlo Naya, ca. 1880

From the palace square, only one footpath has traditionally led out to the city, the Calle Tamossi, which goes south-east, through the Ponte Storto, the Crooked Bridge, to the church of San Aponal. As the Palazzo Salviati, opposite the Albrizzi Palace on the same square, is now an elementary school, Tamossi street and the bridge are flooded every morning and afternoon with children and their parents heading to school or home from it. And the Sotoportego del Tamossi, branching off from it, is occupied by higher class students, who try the first cigarettes of their lives under the dark arcades.

Tamossi street and Tamossi gateway seen from Ponte Storto

On the way home from school

Campiello Albrizzi, after school. To the right, the Albrizzi Palace

All these stories are recalled by no plaque. That would be so parvenu, only the Italians do that. The Venetian local patriot knows them, and the curious stranger collects them from the chronicles of the Venetian local patriots, as we do in our map of Venice. Nevertheless, on the wall of the Albrizzi Palace there is a plaque, which the students can see well while playing in the square or from the classroom window, and over the eight years of their studies it becomes an integral part of their world view. Of course, this was also placed here by the Italians. Its text was drafted by no less than Gabriele D’Annunzio, in 1916. Under a piece of iron fixed in a marble plate, the following text can be read:


“THIS SPLINTER OF BARBARY / MOUNTED IN NOBLE STONE / ACCUSES THE ETERNAL ENEMY / WHO ADDED SHAME TO HIS SHAME / AND GLORY TO OUR GLORY.”

This memorial plaque here, in this cozy nook of Venice can be even regarded an Austro-Hungarian memorial site. In fact, this piece of iron is a fragment of a bomb that was thrown at the city during the First World War. And the eternal enemy is us.

In the eyes of the Italian military leadership, Venice made the ideal logistics center in a future war because of its proximity to the terre irredente, the “unredeemed lands”, that is, the partly Italian-inhabited territories to be acquired from Austria; its good communications on land and sea; as well as the blind faith that no enemy would dare touch this historical city. From the late 19th century they provided the city with military reinforcements, surrounded it with fortresses, naval ports and airports, and established war factories in its suburbs. For example, in the Venetian Arsenale, the thousand-year-old center of shipbuilding, they would develop the MAS (motoscafo armato silurante, torpedo armed motorboat), which would cause great damage to the Austro-Hungarian fleet, by sinking, among others, the battleships Wien and Szent István.

Map of the terre irredente (South Tyrol, Trieste-Istria and Zara-Spalato) (1915)

Wreckage of the battleship Wien, sunk in the port of Trieste (salvage of 1925)

Torpedoing and sinking the battleship Szent István

The Central Powers intelligence, of course, was aware of these preparations. They also knew well what an advantage this military base was for the Italian army, hardly a hundred and fifty kilometers from the Isonzo front. And so, just a few hours after the Italian declaration of war, at 3:30 a.m. on May 24, 1915, the Austro-Hungarian Air Force began to bomb the Arsenale and the munition factories. The bombings were repeated at irregular, roughly monthly, intervals until 23 October 1918. A total of forty-two runs took place, and more than a thousand bombs were dropped on Venice, mainly on the factories, the railway station and the surrounding munition stores, but because of inaccurate aiming, several bombs went astray, and fell on monuments or residential houses. Over three years, bombs killed fifty-two and wounded eighty-four people.

Above: Air-raid shelters in the city of Venice. Below: The map of bomb hits between 1915 and 1918. The detailed list is included in Police Inspector Rambaldo Gaspari’s Elenco delle bombe gettate da velivoli nemici sulla città negli anni di guerra 1915-1918 (A list of the bombs dropped on the city by enemy planes in the war years of 1915-1918). The map shows that the hits were concentrated mainly around the Arsenale and the railway station. Only on 8-9 August 1915 did they bomb by mistake the area of Santa Maria Formosa at the bend of the Grand Canal instead of the port.

The city defended itself as they could. The altanas, the typical afternoon tea pavilions built on the top of the houses of Venice, became observation points, from which the Navy stared at the sky day and night, and in case of air raid some rudimentary air defense was carried out. Its hits were just as uncertain as those of the bombers. This heroic vigil would then become the source of several romantic remembrances in the 1920s.

A memorial card about the Italian “bombing” of Vienna, where D’Annunzio just dropped leaflets on the city

Movable works of art were taken downstairs or to the basement. After the Caporetto breakthrough, when the front arrived so close to the city, that the Austro-Hungarian troops could have shot the city with artillery (although they did not), these items were transported farther away to Rome by railway. And the unmoveable artworks were covered in soft materials and surrounded by sand bags on the basis of Domenico Rupolo, called “the city’s new tailor”. As this “wrapping” occurred with the co-operation of the institute for the protection of monuments, many photos were made, some of which were even sold on postcards. In the photos exhibited in the Tre Oci Palace in Venice, the completely wrapped city is an impressive view, which by far exceeds Christo’s largest projects. However, the principle of Christo’s wrappings, revelation through concealment, here applies, too. The city, hidden behind screens, stands and sandbags, shows a completely new face which stresses those elements which it hides the most. It would be an interesting quiz in art history to ask which works of arts are hidden behind the sacks in each picture.

Piazza San Marco

Affliggetemi, guai dolenti (Strike on me, painful blows). Francesco Cavalli: L’Artemisia, atto 2. Hana Blažíková, L’Arpeggiata, 2015

Palazzo Ducale, Scala dello Scrutinio

Waiting for the train in the station of Venice, after the Caporetto breakthrough

The large-scale protective mission was largely successful. Among the monuments, only the church of Santa Maria degli Scalzi next to the railway station, and the church of Santa Maria Formosa were severely damaged: both vaults collapsed, the former with a fresco of Tiepolo. The bell tower of San Francesco della Vigna, next to the Arsenale, was also hit. Bomb splinters caused minor damage in the interior of San Giovanni e Paolo and on the facade of San Marco. And finally, in the last year of the war, on 27 February 1918, a bomb fell on one of the richest Venetian churches, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Breaking through the ceiling, it fell directly in front of Tiziano’s Pesaro Altarpiece – and it did not explode. Still today it is exposed next to the altarpiece, as the second witness of the former Austro-Hungarian bombing of Venice.

Rialto, Fondamenta del Ferro. A bomb hitting Spiess Brewery

The epilogue of the air raids. Salvaging the Austrian K. 228 plane, shot down by the Italian anti-aircraft forces, from the laguna next to Casino degli spiriti

Venice, as you have never seen

“When my parents took me to Venice, we stayed only a few hours. My father limited to two the buildings we actually entered: the Basilica of St. Mark and Harry’s Bar”, writes John Julius Norwich, the great monographer of Venice. And we, modern tourists are not very different either.

In this long weekend I would like to show you another Venice, after many years of walking around and reading about Venice. Going from courtyard to courtyard, house to house, revealing the hidden secrets, telling the stories of the places, from the Armenian monastery to the just 500-year-old Jewish ghetto, from the palace of the Patriarch of Venice to the fishermens’ quarter of Beggar St. Nicholas, from the oldest – by six years 1600 years old – church of Venice to the modern housing estates converted from the old factories.

Venice is a small-scale town, only a small company can really explore it. I am looking forward to eight participants on the long weekend of 12 to 15 March. If we are more, we will repeat it in April. We start with a minibus in the dawn from Budapest (if you come from elsewhere, you can join us later), we stay in an old palazzo in the heart of the old town, next to the church of the Frari, we have dinner in the last traditional taverns left. At the end of the four days we will take with us a different Venice, a city close to our hearts, to which we will want to come back many times.

Participation fee (minibus, acommodation, guide): 350 euro. Registration at the usual e-mail wang@studiolum.com.

The sights of Rialto and surroundings (the eastern part of the sestiere San Polo), trailer of a full interactive map of Venice. An illustration to how we will walk around all Venice.

Città irreale

“At sunset all cities look wonderful, but some more so than others. Reliefs become suppler, columns more rotund, capitals curlier, cornices more resolute, spires starker, niches deeper, disciples more draped, angels airborne. In the streets it gets dark, but it is still daytime for the Fondaments and that gigantic liquid mirror where motorboats, vaporetti, gondolas, dinghies, and barges “like scattered old shoes” zealously trample Baroque and Gothic façades, not sparing your own or a passing cloud’s reflection either. “Depict it,” whispers the winter light, stopped flat by the brick wall of a hospital or arriving home at the paradise of San Zaccaria’s frontone after its long passage through the cosmos. And you sense this light’s fatigue as it rests in Zaccaria’s marble shell for another hour or so, while the earth is turning its other cheek to the luminary. This is the winter light at its purest. It carries no warmth or energy, having shed them and left them behind somewhere in the universe, or in the nearby cumulus. Its particles’ only ambition is to reach an object and make it, big or small, visible. It’s a private light, the light of Giorgione or Bellini, not the light of Tiepolo or Tintoretto. And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”

Joseph Brodsky: Watermark. An essay on Venice, 1992