SALUTE FEAST

On the 21st of November 2006, as tradition, it will take place the most heart-felt among the Venetian feasts: the Salute. The Salute feast, like as the Redentore one, reminds a terrible pestilence and the consequent vow of thanks made concrete in the church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin.

But unlike the Redentore, the Salute feast has maintained intact the religious concentration and thanks. It was the year 1630 when the Venetian ground was it by the second among the greatest pestilences of its history. The doge asked the intercession of the Virgin getting to build the highest church of Venice. The pestilence ended and the basilica was completed in 1687 to thank the Virgin. By then every year this feast takes place and all believing Venetians take a candle at the basilica after have crossed in procession a votive bridge, appositely built for the occasion.

This bridge leads the pilgrims from Santa Maria del Giglio to Salute. The atmosphere of the church in that day is a symbol, that is by this time a little bit decaying, of the truest Venetian traditions that disappear “asphalted” by superficial tourism and by speculation in itself.

TYPICAL DISH

“Castradina” (mutton) is an homage to the fidelity of the Slav populations which lived in Venetian dominions (Dalmatia) and were the only ones that provided Venice with food. The only thing that there abounded was the animal most diffused in that area, present Croatia: the ram, the male of the sheep.

The recipe provides that you supply yourself with a piece of salt and cured mutton (leg of mutton). If you didn’t find it, you plainly can buy a piece of fresh mutton. Cut up in stew the leg and get it boiled on a low flame for two hours.

If you had found the salt and cured mutton, change the cooked water after the mutton has wasted its fat. Add a cabbage cut in little pieces, it would be better if it had been previously browned in the frying-pan with onion and olive-oil.

Cook all for an hour and add a bit of salt and pepper. Limit spices because this meat is very tasty and its savour is intense.

THE BASILICA

The construction of the basilica was assigned to a young architect, Baldassarre Longhena, who realized a spectacular and original project. His plan was chosen also because it agreed with a natural ambiguousness of Venetian Republic: the perfect and talebano harmony between religious and political power. The Basilica, in fact, on the one hand exalts the Blessed Virgin and on the other hand extols Venice and its political power. The basilica has an unusual round base, which symbol represented the Virgin’s protective circle and, therefore, Venice itself. The style of the church is an imposing late baroque, in which domes and volutes launch towards the height the whole structure and give to the end of the Grand Canal a scenography that takes you the breath away.

The best points from where you can admire the basilica are from the Academy bridge (a little defiladed) or looking down from the bell tower in Saint Mark Square. The interior is imposing, but the regularity both of the colonnade and of all the structure reminds us the entry of the architecture history into the neo-classicism. Magnificent is the marble group that metaphorically represents on a side Venice kneeling at the Virgin’s feet while invoking her protection and on the other side the Plague that is drove away.