Campo Bandera E Moro

“The most beautiful thing about Venice is Venice itself” says John Norwitch Norbert in the introduction to his book The History of Venice. While that may be true to some, looking closer at the details of Venice is interesting too. There is so much intricate detail and so much unique character in every campo. There can be a church with a medieval side and a baroque front right next to a building with Venetian gothic windows and a neoclassical door. The Venetian saying of com’era dov’era is obvious when you see these elements juxtaposed next to each other, and this is true of the Campo Bandiera E Moro.

De Botton, in his book The Art of Travel, talks about Ruskin, who recognizes that beauty isn’t always as simple as we think it is. “He recognized that many places strike us as beautiful not on the basis of aesthetic criteria-because the colors match or they symmetry and proportion are present-but on the basis of psychological criteria, inasmuch as they embody a value or mood of importance to us” (Alain de Botton, 229). Campo Bandiera E Moro embodies this idea- it had a simplistic beauty not in the buildings themselves, but the feelings you got from being there. A boy kicked a soccer ball with his friends, filling the air with laughter and youthful spirit. A tree stood in the middle of the campo and offered shade to the parents whose kids were running around having fun after school. Older couples ate at the Caffé Girani, all their chairs facing the same direction, east, toward the church San Giovanni in Bragadora. You could tell that this church was important, with its pointed arch doorway and Greek cross at the very peak, unassuming façade and yet imposing structure that told you that this was the center of attention without being too flashy about it. Or perhaps the people were just facing toward the campo, not the church itself, because the campo is important to these people, it is their home and what keeps them alive, and they want to face it and take it all in.

The truly amazing thing about this campo though, is that it was only one street away from the Riva Degli Schiavoni, or the main road that connected the water with the city. Thousands of people walk that road a day, mostly tourists looking at the bridge of sighs, the Doge’s palace, and various tourist traps along the way. And yet this campo feels like an entirely different world, just a block away from that other one. Completely peaceful, with everyone knowing the local customs and families stopping here after school for the day. This completely changed my idea of being a tourist in Venice, because the first day we saw from the basilica to the Rialto, the busiest tourist area in Venice, packed with people wearing bucket hats and shops selling magnets and postcards. But this whole other world was just a block away. When I discovered this campo we had been walking all day in the heat, and I wanted nothing more than to relax. So I filled up my water bottle in the fountain in the square, and sat beneath the tree to cool off. At around three in the afternoon, during the heat of the day, it was perfect, and this is when I truly got a view of how the campo functioned as one of many. Every person there truly belonged, and this was the center of their life, where kids and adults alike could come and relax at any time of the day.

It's hard to imagine living in one of these buildings, where the square geometric windows, clarity, and simplicity of one building contrasts so totally with the building next to it, with pointed arches, verticality, and elaborate details. Having buildings next to each other that are so opposite of each other help give this campo a homey feel, even with a grand church sitting across from them. “But what do we mean when we say that the photograph, in its turn, is like the landscape it represents?” (E.H. Gombrich 34) A photo can never truly capture the liveliness or uniqueness of a space. You can’t hear the laughter in a photograph, nor can you smell the aromas coming from the café or feel the heat of the sun on your back. So though I can capture the different shapes of windows, the fleur de lis on the doors, the volutes with no purpose except beauty, I can’t capture how much the campo felt like a home.

works cited:

de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Bollingen Series 5. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969.