Santa Maria Formosa

You are in the sestiere of Castello, in a huge campo where real Venetians still cross paths with their shopping bags. The church has a curious name: Santa Maria "Formosa", the beautiful.

1A vision

According to tradition, in the 7th century the Virgin appeared to St Magnus, bishop of Oderzo, in the form of a beautiful woman, formosa, and showed him where to build her church. It is a legend: the earliest document mentioning the church dates from 1060. The present building was rebuilt by Mauro Codussi from 1492, and the Cappello family paid for both facades.

2The twelve Marys

Another story linked to this church tells how pirates carried off a group of Venetian brides and how craftsmen from this district, the chest-makers, rescued them. This is said to be the origin of the Festa delle Marie, still held during Carnival. The doge did indeed come here every year on Candlemas.

John Ruskin, in "The Stones of Venice", described the head on the bell tower as huge, inhuman and monstrous, the symbol of the decadence he saw in the late Renaissance.

3The face on the bell tower

Find the door of the Baroque bell tower. Above it is a mask with a twisted mouth and swollen eyes. Faces like this, called mascheroni, were put up to ward off the evil eye. Some today read it as the portrait of a real illness, but that is only a hypothesis. In 1916 an Austrian bomb badly damaged the church.

4What to look for

• The mask above the bell tower door.
• The two facades, one on the campo and one on the canal.
• The sheer size of the campo, one of the widest in the city.