Scalzi

Right before the Lista di Spagna ends at the station, eternally obscured by a wall of tat-selling peddlers, this church was commissioned in the 1670s by Gerolamo Cavazza, a nouveau riche arriviste celebrating his recent admission to the Golden Book.

The Carmelite Scalzi (‘barefoot’, though they wore sandals) were a prestigious religious order, and although Cavazza flamboyantly financed them (74,000 ducats, he boasted), the friars could have spent it better than on the petrified operetta stuck on Giuseppe Sardi’s perilous façade – the figure of Hope has already fallen off and broken into bits.

Letting Baldassare Longhena follow his fancy in the interior wasn’t a good idea, either, resulting in gloomy, opulent, overpopulated Baroque encrustations from the dark side of his imagination (shadows he managed to keep out of his masterpiece, La Salute).