Ponte Marcello

Very nice bridge

Bridges and canals, bridges and canals! Makes you wonder exactly how many are found in this city.

The bridge owes its name to the Marcello family, the owner of the building that stands on the side of the bridge. Over the centuries the family had doges and bishops, but also great fighters, including Lorenzo, called the lightning of war, who, as captain of the Venetian galleys in 1600, distinguished himself in the fight against the Turkish galleys, losing his arm and dying hit by a cannonball during battle with the Turks at the Dardanelles. The last known from the lineage was Benedetto Marcello, who lived between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was a diligent artist for his poetic but above all musical works, so much so that he earned the nickname of Prince of Venetian Music. Today, the Venice Conservatory of Music is dedicated to him. On the side of the bridge is an area called Rio del Malcanton (bad corner zones), the theory after which it was named is the following, in the early 14th century Ramberto Polo, Bishop of Castella, from the Bishop of San Pantalon, Bartolomeo Dandolo demanded a tithe (ie tax) on the dead from the parish, as were paid by the Bishops of other churches. Pastor Bartolomeo Dandolo, based on a reports and customs received from the previous bishop, believed that he did not have to pay it. According to stories, when Ramperto and his supporters went there to forcibly collect taxes, the moment they reached this bridge and area, he was attacked and killed by some commoners from the area. The rivalry between Castellani and Nicolotti, two factions around which the population of Venice was divided, also seems to have arisen from this episode. On the facades of the buildings and palaces at the foot of the bridge, some capitals and reliefs and a family crest can be observed, above the entrance door of Palazzo Marcello, now a hotel, representing a Gothic shield supported by a half-length angel and included in a rectangle with notched edge.