They could be the remains of the ancient one church of San Geminiano. They were found at Venezia just below Piazza San Marcoduring an excavation campaign, wallsvarious levels of flooring it’s a tomb dating back toAlto Middle Ages which probably belonged to this church, one of the oldest in the city, of which traces had been lost. The news was given by the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of the municipality.
The excavations – directed by the doctor Sara Bini of the Superintendency of Venice – had begun a few months ago to restore the builders, Venetian term to identify the stone blocks used for the most recent paving of the square, damaged by high water in recent years, and then had expanded until they reached the area of the Procuratie Vecchie, the official headquarters of the Prosecutors of San Marco at the time of the Serenissima, and therefore occupying the center of the square itself.
And it was during these excavations that walls and various levels of flooring were discovered, some dating back to before the year 1000, which covered Piazza San Marco before the paving we know today. A first was found under the signs long and narrow brick paving arranged in a fishbone pattern and further down an older flooring.
In addition to the walls and floors, one was also discovered common burial with the remains of at least five people, including a child between eight and ten years old and a woman, all dating back to a period between the 7th and 8th centuries. In ancient times, the Superintendency explained, it was common to bury bodies next to or inside places of worship and equally frequent to place multiple deceased people inside the same tomb.
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«The sources at this point speak of the presence of the sole church of San Geminiano and the cemeteries almost always developed in reference to a nearby cult building, therefore we can hypothesize with high probability that we have intercepted the structures and floors of the church itself, allowing us to investigate at least in part one of the oldest cult buildings in Venice” is the hypothesis of the archaeologists after the discovery of the walls, the floors and then the tomb.
The church of San Geminiano it existed long before the Basilica of San Marco was built and before the square took on its current shape. It is important not only because it could be one of the oldest in Venicebut also because it was a church that i Doges of the first centuries of the Republic of Venice were very devout so much so that the building is also known as Church of the Doges.
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Over time, with the urban changes that affected the square, the church of San Geminiano was gradually moved (in the 12th century to the end of the square with the facade facing the Basilica of San Marco and then rebuilt again not far away in the second half of the 16th century thanks to Jacopo Sansovino and finally demolished by Napoleon in 1807), but its original location in the center of the current Piazza San Marco had never been identified. If the hypotheses made after the latest excavations were confirmed, the remains that emerged would therefore belong to this first nucleus of the church.
Already Federico Berchet and Giacomo Bonihad conducted excavations similar to the current ones between 1885 and 1889 intercepting some walls in this point of the square which however they had not managed to frame from a historical point of view. Also thanks to the extremely precise plan of the excavations carried out by Berchet, the technicians have managed to formulate these hypotheses today.
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– 2024-04-05 21:28:24
