Discover Campo Santa Margherita

The campo is not a designed square. Its long, kinked, tapering shape is the record of a filled canal and of buildings added piecemeal along both edges over several centuries -- the opposite of Venice's composed set pieces at San Marco or Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

The buildings around it are domestic in scale and mostly plain: three- and four-storey Gothic and later houses in rendered brick, with shops at ground level. Two structures interrupt that rhythm. The Scuola dei Varoteri stands free in the middle of the campo rather than along an edge, a small isolated block with a relief of the Virgin sheltering the confraternity's members on its canal face.

At the southern end, the truncated campanile of Santa Margherita survives without its church -- the body was demolished after suppression and the tower absorbed into a university auditorium, its bell chamber removed and the stump capped flat. It is one of the clearest visible traces in Venice of the Napoleonic closures.

Baldassare Longhena's facade for the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, off the campo's western corner, is deliberately restrained for a Baroque work -- flat pilasters and shallow relief -- because the confraternity's money went into the interior, where a trompe-l'oeil tiled landing and gilded stucco ceiling lead up to the Tiepolo hall.