Piazzetta San Marco

The most glittering of all the world's belvederes, the most suggestive of great occasion and lofty circumstance.... Jan Morris, The Venetian Empire

The Piazzetta San Marco is Venice’s traditional foyer, where visitors from overseas would disembark at the Molo under the sleepless eye of the state bureaucracy. A few hundred years ago, one section of it was reserved for patricians, politicking in their trailing robes. This was known as the Broglio (or ‘kitchen garden’), for it once grew the turnips for the nuns at San Zaccaria.

Long before modern politicians had smoke-filled rooms, the Venetians had their Broglio for making deals, and for soliciting votes whenever an election was up; a number of visitors remarked on the quaint sight of a grand patrician from one of the oldest families, bowing so low to kiss the edge of an elector’s sleeve that his neck stole scraped the ground. The very Byzantine intrigues, entanglements and machinations that went on here, some say, gave Italian and then English the word imbroglio.

The Two Columns