Gothic Venice Tour - Art Scenes

VENICE

Gothic

The Arsenale (built in 1104) turn Venice into a maritime military power and The Venetian Grosso (minted from 1193 till 1370) made it the first international financial center with tourist and merchants from all over the Silk Road; and these merchants/bankers commissioned sophisticated palaces with ornate interiors that you can still visit today — so get your cape ready to go back to the times of Marco Polo.

Time period: 1200s-1400s

Movie or bookbook: Venice: building a floating city (2024)/The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa

Soundtrack: Gregorian Chants/Medieval flutes

Fashion: black outfit, silk top plus statement jewelry and a cape

Budget: 105€ (70€ for museums + 45€ for food)

Piri Reis: Map of Venice (for an Ottoman sultan); Turkey, late 1400s

This walking tour would take you through San Marco, the neighborhood where you can find the main public buildings of the ancient republic; and through the Rialto commercial district, where rich merchants built their gothic palazzos close to the market. The area is characterized by: gothic architecture, narrow streets and of course canales. Ancient romans once flee into the marshlands of the Venetian lagoon establishing a city state based on the Reppublica Romana in 697. Then in 828 they stole the body of St Mark the Evangelist (in reference to Mars, the god of war) from Alexandria, and declared him the patron of the City. Three hundred years latter Venezia established itself as the military power in the Mediterranean in 1104 with the construction of the Arsenale: a complex of shipyards and armories (basically a factory of boats and weapons with storage units) to create its own navy and trade military equipment. The city became the last port in the Silk Road: French, German and English merchants would come here to trade with Venetians, Byzantines and Tuscans; transforming Venice into the first international trade center with banks and coin exchange businesses. From 1193 till 1332 Venice minted its own silver coin, the Venetian Grosso (which was the dollar of the time). In 1202-1204 the Dodge Enrico Dándolo managed to persuade the crusaders to sack Constantinople, and to bring some relics and artifacts to the city as form of payment for the arsenal used in the crusade — and in doing so the knights made the Republic of Venice the super power of Europe. This is the beginning of the industrial military complex and the tradition of creating petty wars to sell weapons financed by banks. For the next 300 hundred years the Serenissima was the center of innovation and style thanks to its wealthy merchants who built gothic palazzos with ornate interiors that were the envy of all the medieval European nobles that came to buy “the richest of the orient”: silk, spices and precious stones. Venice did not have royals instead it had a sophisticated system of oligarchs (known as Consiglio dei Dieci: ten patrician magistrates elected by the Great Council to a one-year term) and aristocrats (known as Il Maggior Consiglio: a council of rich merchants that had over a thousand members by 1297) who took the decision on behalf of the citizens of the republic. By 1320 became really hard to get in the council and by 1390 impossible, establishing the “Venetian Black Nobility” whose members were kept in the Libro d’Oro: the formal directory and list of the Venetian aristocracy. The hegemony of the Silk Road diminished after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, along the spread of the Black Death across Eurasia — but Venezia was not over. The tour suggest visiting the cathedral and old city hall plus brunch in the morning; 3 small gothic houses plus a church in the afternoon; and the Rialto market plus dinner at night.