Torcello Cathedral

On a near-empty island in the northern Venetian lagoon stands the oldest building in the Venice area: the former cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta at Torcello. Its plain brick exterior gives little warning of the interior, where gold-ground Byzantine mosaics, among the earliest surviving in the region around Venice, cover the apse and the whole west wall.

Torcello was settled by refugees from the Roman city of Altinum, which was destroyed in the 5th century, and it grew into a busy trading community long before Venice rose to dominance; at its peak, in the 10th century, its population is usually estimated at around 20,000. An inscription records the founding of the church in 639 under the exarch Isaac of Ravenna. Bishop Adeodatus II rebuilt it in 864, adding the side apse chapels, the stepped bench for the clergy behind the altar and the crypt, and in 1008 Bishop Otto Orseolo, son of Doge Pietro II Orseolo, raised the nave and gave the church its present form of a nave with two aisles behind a narthex. The tall campanile dates from the 11th century; in front of the façade lie the remains of the 7th-century baptistery, and alongside stands the centrally planned church of Santa Fosca.

The mosaics were made by Byzantine-trained craftsmen in the 11th and 12th centuries. In the main apse a slender standing Virgin holding the Child, of the Hodegetria type, floats alone against a field of gold above a row of apostles. Opposite, the west wall unfolds in tiers: the Crucifixion, the Descent into Limbo and, across the four lower registers, a vast Last Judgement with the weighing of souls, the blessed and the torments of the damned. As the lagoon around the island silted into marsh and malaria spread, residents moved to Burano, Murano and Venice from the late Middle Ages, and today only about a dozen people live on Torcello, which leaves the cathedral, Santa Fosca and the small museum in the old palaces set in near-rural quiet. Near the church stands a stone seat that local tradition calls Attila's Throne, though it was most likely the chair of a magistrate or bishop.

Getting there

Torcello lies in the northern Venetian lagoon, next to Burano. Water buses run from Fondamente Nove in Venice (line 12, with a short connection from Burano on line 9 for much of the day). Venice Marco Polo Airport (VCE) is about 5 km away across the lagoon; the Lido is roughly 11 km away in a straight line.