Last weekend I was in Venice for La Festa del Redentore, the Feast of the Most Holy Redeemer, celebrated on the third Sunday in July. In La Serenissima it is a very big deal indeed. The origins of the celebrations lie in a plague epidemic which broke out in the city in 1575. The epidemic swept through the city killing some fifty thousand people, among them Titian. On 4 September 1576 the Doge Alvise I Mocenigo vowed a church to dedicated to the Holy Redeemer on the island of Giudecca as an ex voto offering in return for the end of the plague which finally began to abate in December of 1576.
The vow to build a church was honoured, and Andrea Palladio, then almost seventy years old and Proto (chief architect) of the Venetian Republic, was commissioned to design a church dedicated to Il Santissimo Redentore. On 3 May of 1577 the foundation stone was laid by the Patriarch of Venice, Giovanni Trevisan, and the definitive end of the plague was declared on 13 July 1577. One third of the city’s population had died in two years. Eight days later, on the twenty-first of July, Doge Sebastian Venier—great hero of Lepanto—led a procession on a votive pontoon bridge constructed from Zattere across the Giudecca Canal to give thanks to the Redentore.
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