Chioggia Cathedral Site Features

The church is a Latin cross in plan with a single wide nave, side chapels, and a domed crossing -- a straightforward, well-proportioned scheme with none of the sculptural drama of Longhena's Salute.

The facade is plain, in brick and stone, and was never given the full architectural treatment the interior implies.

Inside, the effect is of light and width rather than height. Longhena kept the elevation low and the windows generous, and the result is a church that reads as calm rather than imposing.

The campanile is the older and more distinctive structure: a detached brick tower of around 1350, square, tall and undecorated, in the Veneto Romanesque-Gothic manner, standing clear of the church on its own foundations.

The side chapels hold seventeenth- and eighteenth-century altarpieces by Venetian-school painters, of varying quality and mostly by minor hands.

The campanile

Around 1350, detached, and the survivor of the fire that took everything else. The oldest standing structure in the town centre.

Longhena's nave

Wide, low and full of light -- the same architect as the Salute, working in a completely different register.

The side altars

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings funded by the fishing confraternities, which is a fair record of who actually paid for this church.

The setting

The cathedral closes the southern end of Corso del Popolo, so the whole length of the town's main street runs up to it.