Venetian Architecture

The Fairytale of Venice

Piazza San Marco and the Architecture of Romance in Summertime

The city of Venice and its monuments function , on the surface , as the framework and backdrop for the storyline in David Lean 's 1955 film Summertime . The action itself advances as a video travelogue immediately impressing us with the fundamental role the sea plays for this water community when the bus ' turns out to be a water taxi and a fire engine a boat . The camera brings us along the Grand Canal , awing us with celluloid paintings ' of

such magnificent examples of lofty Venetian design and decoration as Longhena 's 17th-century Church of Santa Maria della Salute , Palladio 's 16th-century Church of San Giorgio Maggiore , and Antonio da Ponte 's late 16th-century Rialto Bridge in rapid succession . Abruptly , we are returned to the realities of ordinary Venetian life . Passing on foot down centuries-old streets to yet another waterway , we witness a Venetian tossing her household garbage unceremoniously into the canal to be carried away by the tides that perpetually cleanse the city , underscoring again the watery foundation that sustains life in Venice . Yet , Venice is more than a simple frame from which the storyline of the film is hung . Venice defines this love story , enabling the protagonists to escape the constraints of their disparate worlds to a magic place imbued with all the mystery and romance of her eclectic past

Venice is the sum beginnings , through its period under Byzantine rule , its lucrative mercantile contact with the West and East , and its proximity to Rome , as evidenced in the many monumental churches , statues , columns , scuole libraries , and palaces that were created by the most prominent architects and artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance . As Spiro Kostof says in The City Shaped (1999 , The city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories : it is where the pride of the past is set on display

In the film , as in Venice itself , Piazza San Marco figures prominently Often , the Piazza is more than a mere backdrop , at times it seems to become a character of its own right . One of the most prominent structures of the Piazza is the Campanile . Originally constructed in the 10th century , the tall brick Campanile with its bronze pyramidal spire seen in the Summertime is actually a 1912 reconstruction of the original as it looked when it collapsed in the early part of the 20th century (Kostof , 1995 . Early on , as Jane wonders what she will do alone in Venice , the bells of the Campanile ring out , seeming to call to her , beckoning her to Piazza San Marco and her fateful encounter with Renato . In their last meeting , just as Jane utters the sentence I don 't want to forget .a single moment ' the Campanile begins to chime once more

Summertime is very much about the meeting of two very different cultures , and this theme is reflected in much of the architecture featured in the film . The most famous of...