The American-British novelist Henry James had no doubt about the leading colour of Venice: pink. And precisely ‘a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink’.1 It is no surprise, hence, to find a soft pink stretch of street in this city – a small wonder among its many. It might be the only genuinely pink street in the world, if we exclude those painted in this colour, such as the Pink Street (Rua Nova do Carvalho) in Lisbon. Walking on the Venetian pink street is an outstanding experience, to which concur the colour shade of the huge and magnificent slabs of granite of which it is made, but also the pleasant impression of softness that the rock conveys to the walker – as stepping on an oxymoronical stone mattress. [Below: Calle del Lovo]
The pink stretch of street lies in the heart of Venice, in Calle del Lovo, a narrow street whose name evokes the wolf – lovo in the Venetian dialect –, but most probably refers to the Lovi family who owned houses in the area.2 Of Calle del Lovo, the pink stretch lies for about 30m between the bridge Ponte del Lovo and Campo San Salvador. We know that the stretch of Calle del Lovo to the west of the bridge was paved in the early 1860s,3 when some ‘dilapidated shacks’ were demolished to enlarge the street.4 We do not know, on the contrary, when the pink granite slabs of street date from. It was recently claimed5 that the street slabs were cut out of that third column which, according to what Francesco Sansovino wrote in the 16the century, would have brought from the East – most probably Constantinople – for St Mark’s Square, but would have sunk in the lagoon with the boat transporting it in 1172. The claim was supported by the presence of the Scuola Grande di San Todaro alongside the pink stretch of Calle del Lovo, a building erected between 1578 and the last decades of the 17th century to celebrate the same St Theodore whose statue stands on one of the two 13th-century columns in St Mark’s Square.6 [Below: Column of St Theodore]
It is unknown, to date, whether the third column existed and, if so, if it was made of the same Egyptian rose granite of the extant Column of St Theodore. However, a comparison between the granite used for the Column of St Theodore and that for Calle del Lovo shows marked differences in texture and colour, with the column more reddish and with a greater interspersion of black. On the contrary, Calle del Lovo’s pink slabs show the same aspect of the pink granite quarried in Baveno, near Lake Maggiore. Slabs of the same pink granite can be seen in stretches of Calle dei Assassini and Calle del Caffettier, while narrow strips of this stone mark the intersection between Calle Larga XXII Marzo and Calle del Sartor da Veste (just below the old Martini Night Club advertisement), Calle del Teatro San Moisè, Calle Cicogna, and Calle do Pozzi. It is worth noting that Calle Larga XXII Marzo – formerly Calle Lunga San Moisè – was enlarged and repaved in 1880. Finally, the same type of granite was also used for the basis of the equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II that was erected in Riva degli Schiavoni in 1887. These findings lead to the assumption that the pavement of Calle del Lovo and the above-mentioned streets with pink granite from Baveno dates to the last decades of the 19th century. [Below, left to right: Calle dei Assassini; Calle del Caffettier; Calle del Sartor da Veste; Calle do Pozzi; equestrial monument of Victor Emmanuel II]
The itinerary [map] proposed here starts from Campo San Salvador and takes you through Calle del Lovo, then Calle dei Assassini, Calle del Caffettier, Calle del Sartor da Veste, and ends in Piazzetta St Mark in front of the Column of St Theodore.
Cover photo and images: © Museo del Camminare 2022
1. James, Henry, Italian Hours, Boston-New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1909, p. 17.
2. Combatti, Bernardo, Nuova planimetria della città di Venezia, Venezia, vol. II, 1846, p. 214.
3. Bembo, Pierluigi, Il Comune di Venezia nel triennio 1860, 1861, 1862, Venezia, Naratovich, 1863 p. 219.
4. Locatelli, Tommaso, L'appendice della Gazzetta di Venezia, Venezia, Tipografia della Gazzetta, vol. XIII, 1877, p. 56.
5. Petito, Riccardo, ‘Lo scultore Orlandi: «Tracce evidenti in calle del Lovo’, in Gazzettino, 11 gennaio 2017.
6. Tigler, Guido, ‘Intorno alle colonne di Piazza San Marco’, in Atti dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Classe di Scienze Morali, Lettere ed Arti/i>, I, 58, 2000, pp. 1-46.
© Museo del Camminare 2022, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0