APPENDIX, 4, 5 419

4. P. 26.-S. PIETRO DI CASTELLO¹

It is credibly reported to have been founded in the seventh century, and (with somewhat less of credibility) in a place where the Trojans, conducted by Antenor, had, after the destruction of Troy, built “un castello chiamato prima Troja, poscia Olivolo, interpretato, luogo pieno.” It seems that St. Peter appeared in person to the Bishop of Heraclea, and commanded him to found, in his honour, a church in that spot of the rising city on the Rialto: “ove avesse veduto una mandra di buoi e di pecore pascolare unitamente. Questa fu la prodigiosa origine della Chiesa di San Pietro, che poscia, o rinovata, o ristaurata da Orso Participazio IV. Vescovo Olivolense, divenne la Cattedrale della Nuova citta.” (Notizie Storiche delle Chiese e Monasteri di Venezia, Padua, 1758.²) What there was so prodigious in oxen and sheep feeding together, we need St. Peter, I think, to tell us. The title of Bishop of Castello was first taken in 1091: St. Mark’s was not made the cathedral church till 1807. It may be thought hardly fair to conclude the small importance of the old St. Pietro di Castello from the appearance of the wretched modernisations of 1620. But these modernisations are spoken of as improvements; and I find no notice of peculiar beauties in the older building, either in the work above quoted, or by Sansovino, who only says that when it was destroyed by fire (as everything in Venice was, I think, about three times in a century) in the reign of Vital Michele,³ it was rebuilt “with good thick walls, maintaining, for all that, the order of its arrangement taken from the Greek mode of building.” This does not seem the description of a very enthusiastic effort to rebuild a highly ornate cathedral. The present church is among the least interesting in Venice; a wooden bridge something like that of Battersea⁴ on a small scale, connects its island, now almost deserted, with a wretched suburb of the city behind the arsenal; and a blank level of lifeless grass, rotted away in places rather than trodden, is extended before its mildewed façade and solitary tower.

5. P. 29.-PAPAL POWER IN VENICE

I may refer the reader to the eleventh chapter of the twenty-eighth book of Daru for some account of the restraints to which the Venetian clergy were subjected. I have not myself been able to devote any time to the examination of the original documents bearing on this matter, but the following

¹ [Ruskin had intended to print some portion of this appendix in the Travellers’ Edition (see above, p. 26). In going over the book for the preparation of that edition, he erased the passage from “The title of Bishop of Castello” to “highly ornate cathedral,” and made the following note:-

“I retain, for exposition of my former vulgar conceit and for permanent humiliation, the following fragments of my old notice of this cathedral.”

The “vulgar conceit” is explained in the author’s note on p. 25, above.]

² [A fuller account of this legend-“quite one of the most precious things in the story of Venice”-is given in St. Mark’s Rest, § 73.]

³ [Sansovino’s Venetia, p. 6. Sansovino does not state which doge of that name he means: the first reigned 1096-1102; the second, 1156-1172.]

⁴ [The old bridge, of course; now replaced by a new bridge opened in 1891.]

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