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# AS IT WAS — BUT WHEN?
- URL: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/venice-campanile-fenice-as-it-was/
- Published: 2026-09-30T07:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T17:32:42.000Z
- Description: I was sitting under St Mark's Campanile and I knew it dates from 1912. It was no use to me, until Notre-Dame put the right question in front of me.
- Author: Giulio Romano
- Tags: Italy, Architecture, Restoration, Travel

Piazza San Marco, 9 July 2023, evening. Paolo Conte is on stage. Kat is pregnant, and Lea, who doesn't yet have a name we can say out loud, has already done the calli all day from the inside. We sat almost beneath the campanile, with that stone over us and Conte's voice bouncing off the Procuratie.

![Audience seen from behind seated in Piazza San Marco at dusk, facing a stage lit in purple between the illuminated arcades of the Procuratie](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/01-piazza-san-marco-concert-july-2023.jpg)

Piazza San Marco, July 2023, a few minutes before the concert.

I knew perfectly well that the campanile dates from 1912.

I knew it because years earlier, at my restoration exam, Professor Fiorani had dwelt at length on Giovannoni, and the collapse of 1902, with everything that followed, was part of the syllabus. I remembered it the way you remember a date: a clean fact, filed away, weightless. There were thousands of us in the square that evening, and how many knew it I can't say, but not many. It is a strange thing to own, that kind of knowledge. You are sitting in a crowd looking at a medieval monument, and you are looking at a twentieth-century building, and nobody sees the difference.

It wasn't that I felt cleverer. It was that I had no use for it. It was a notion that just sat there, like a book you studied badly and left on a shelf, and which is only any use when life puts the right question in front of you.

Paris put the question in front of me, three years later.

I had come back from the restored Notre-Dame, which had struck me as too new, almost fake. I have written about it [elsewhere](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/notre-dame-chartres-light/), because the answer lay in the light and not in the stone. But I had brought a sentence home with me, said to Kat on the parvis, that seemed obvious: in Italy this would never have been done.

And then the campanile came back to me, with its foundations widened on thousands of new piles, its new bricks, the two lions of St Mark carved again on purpose because the real ones had been chiselled off on the orders of the Provisional Municipality in 1797, after the fall of the Republic. One of the most photographed objects in Italy. Built when the first steel skyscrapers were going up in Europe.

The campanile is the proof that we did it first.

## Shortly before ten

On 14 July 1902 the campanile slumps down into itself.

It doesn't fall with a crash: it slides down inside its own footprint, as if someone had knocked its legs out from under it. No one is killed. Sansovino's Loggetta at its foot is destroyed, and a corner of the Library is damaged. The square is buried under a mountain of bricks, and that same evening the city council, chaired by the mayor, Filippo Grimani, votes to rebuild. "Where it was and as it was", Grimani himself will say when the foundation stone is laid, the following year.

That same evening. A few hours later. Without an inquiry, without a competition, without a single engineer having had time to look at the rubble.

The debate comes afterwards, and anyone who believes we in Italy have always been of one mind should read it in full. Otto Wagner writes that, now the disaster has happened, rebuilding in the old style would mean falsifying the history of architecture, and that the modern language too has a right to appear in Piazza San Marco. Carducci objects: the absence should be left visible, not disguised. The socialist Elia Musatti goes so far as to say that many Venetians, when asked, prefer the square as it has become, without the campanile, now that Sansovino's corner can finally be seen. Between 1906 and 1907 the works stop for about a year over fine points of philology. The critics are dismissed as moralists without feeling.

The campanile reopens on 25 April 1912, St Mark's Day, ten years later.

Gustavo Giovannoni, many years on, sums up the affair with a frankness worth a treatise. The innovators, he writes, put forward "so many principles, perfectly right in theory, which we still hear echoing at every moment". But "the unanimous feeling of the Venetians would have none of it, and the campanile rose again 'where it was and as it was'".

Cesare Brandi, in his *Theory of Restoration*, is far harsher, and takes aim at the formula by name. The nostalgic adage of *com'era, dov'era*, as it was, where it was, he writes, "is the negation of the very principle of restoration, an offence to history and an outrage to Aesthetics", because it makes time reversible and the work of art reproducible at will. On the campanile he is blunt: what mattered in that square was a vertical element, and replacing it with a copy can be justified neither historically nor artistically.

Then time did what it always does. The operation born to save the memory of the campanile has erased that memory, and today millions of people a year photograph it without knowing what they are photographing.

![The island of San Giorgio Maggiore across the lagoon, with Palladio's white church and its brick campanile](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/02-san-giorgio-maggiore-campanile-venice.jpg)

Across the basin, San Giorgio Maggiore. Its campanile fell too, in 1774, and was rebuilt by 1791\. Nobody photographs it as a copy either.

## Ninety-four years later

Four hundred metres away, and ninety-four years later, the same city did the same thing again.

On 29 January 1996 La Fenice burns, and it is arson. Two electricians from the firm doing the maintenance start what they mean to be a small fire to avoid a penalty for running late, and the blaze devours everything, leaving only the perimeter walls standing. The decision is immediate, and so is the slogan, taken up by the then mayor, Massimo Cacciari. The reconstruction, to a design by Aldo Rossi, brings the theatre back into use with a concert at the end of 2003 and with the opera season the following year.

The case is dismissed too quickly, even by those who cite it to make a point. Rossi's design, completed by his collaborators after his death in 1997, is not a simulacrum: the surviving atrium and the Sale Apollinee were treated conservatively, and only the lost parts were reinstated philologically, with traditional materials and techniques. He called the restoration of the decoration an act of love towards the surviving fragments, and said the aim was to keep the building's history readable after the work was done.

But the crux is something else, and it is this.

Selva's theatre of 1792 had already burned in 1836; it was rebuilt by the Meduna brothers and reopened on 26 December 1837\. The auditorium the world mourned in 1996 was not the eighteenth-century one: it was the decoration designed by Giovan Battista Meduna after the competition of 1853\. Rebuilding it as it was meant rebuilding a nineteenth-century state.

Exactly as in Paris, where rebuilding the spire as it was meant rebuilding Viollet-le-Duc's flèche, that is, a nineteenth-century addition, and not some hypothetical medieval arrangement.

*Com'era, dov'era* is never a return to the origin. It is the choice to elevate one moment in a building's history to the canonical state, and that choice almost always falls on the last image collective memory holds on to. An emotional decision dressed up as a philological one.

Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, the day after the Venetian reopening, remarked acidly that the inauguration had been a triumph because ours is a structurally conservative society, and that if you really must falsify, you might as well do it intelligently. The debate here has never closed: the campanile still appears today on lists of Italy's historical fakes.

Two buildings, one city, a century. And in neither case did anyone take the trouble to say what we were doing.

## The double polarity

None of this has anything to do with Italian restoration theory.

From Camillo Boito onwards, an intervention has to declare itself as an intervention. In the principles Boito had adopted at the congress of Italian engineers and architects in 1883, it is written in black and white that added or renewed pieces must be "of evidently different material", or carry "an incised sign or, better, the date of the restoration", so that not even the attentive observer can "be led into deception". This is not a recommendation of taste. It is the obligation to sign your own addition. Brandi then fixed the principle that the work must be handed on to the future in its double polarity, aesthetic and historical together. History is not a defect to be corrected: it is part of the thing. From there follows everything else: the patina you don't remove, minimum intervention, reversibility. And from there follows the Venice Charter of 1964, whose Article 15, on excavations, states that "all reconstruction work should however be ruled out 'a priori'" and allows only anastylosis, the reassembling of existing but dismembered parts. A document that bears the name of the city where the campanile had already been rebuilt fifty-two years earlier, and that says almost word for word the opposite of what that city had done.

That line has come down to us through the Roman school, of which Giovanni Carbonara was the acknowledged head until his death in 2023\. A pupil of Renato Bonelli, formed in Brandi's wake, he moved the school towards critical-conservative positions: conservative because the monument must be handed on to the future in the best possible condition, critical because every intervention is a case of its own and cannot be reduced to a rule. He used to repeat, quoting Paul Philippot, that restoration is a critical act "expressed not verbally but in the very language of the work being restored". In other words: you write your interpretation on the building, and you have no way of taking it back.

And this is where Carbonara is useful, because he left behind a tool that cuts. Reinstatement, reinvention, more or less complete rebuilding, he says, are not restoration. They are something else. They may even be legitimate, but they have to be called by their name.

Let's apply it. St Mark's Campanile is not a bad restoration: it is an excellent reinstatement. La Fenice is not a bad restoration: it is an excellent reinstatement, with a genuine restoration inside it, that of the Sale Apollinee, which is the only part of the operation the word truly belongs to. Neither should be judged by Brandi's criteria, because neither ever claimed to respect them.

The problem is not having done them. It is what we call them. Because as long as reinstatement is called restoration, the discipline that ought to tell them apart loses every word it has for doing so, and the next resolution passed that same evening goes through under the same noble name.

The other thing Carbonara said is that the historical and the aesthetic claims are often irreconcilable, and have to be balanced case by case, as a matter of culture and visual sensibility. No rule decides for you. There is a choice, and someone who takes responsibility for it.

## The French road

The French call the same choice by another name, and that changes everything.

The founding definition of their restoration belongs to Viollet-le-Duc, the man who in the nineteenth century built the spire of Notre-Dame, the one we watched fall live in 2019\. The entry opens with a warning almost no one quotes: the word and the thing, he writes, are modern. Restoration is a nineteenth-century invention, and has to be defined from scratch. To restore a building, he goes on, is not to maintain it, repair it or remake it: it is to re-establish it in a complete state that may never have existed at any given moment.

Here in Italy that sentence is quoted as an example of what not to do. In France it is the postulate of a discipline: restoration is a project, and it involves a choice about which history you want to give back. It has to be said that the formula is subtler than the way we use it, and that Viollet-le-Duc never claimed his restitutions were authentic. Even then, within the historic monuments commission, Prosper Mérimée believed the architect should show restraint so as to preserve the monument's authenticity. And across the Channel, Ruskin was writing that restoration is the most total destruction a building can suffer, and that a crutch is better than a lost limb.

In 2019 that quarrel reopened in parliament. During the debate on the law for the restoration of Notre-Dame, several deputies tabled amendments to impose an identical restoration, some explicitly demanding that the spire follow Viollet-le-Duc's drawings. The legislature chose not to choose: the text that passed says only that the works must preserve the historic, artistic and architectural interest of the monument, and leaves the rest to the specialists.

I recognise that passage well, because it is the condition I work in. The rules set the perimeter and the responsibilities; then the real choice is signed by someone on site, with his own face and his own stamp. And when the rules are silent, the gap is filled case by case.

And indeed it was filled in two opposite ways inside the same building. For the spire and the roof, the specialists carried out exactly the identical restoration the law had not imposed. For the interior they did the opposite, going as far as deciding to replace windows the fire had never so much as touched. Barry Bergdoll, introducing Villeneuve in New York, said that every act of restoration involves a decision about which history is being recovered. There, two decisions were taken, opposite ones, on the same site.

## The border

Lined up side by side, the three cases say something I hadn't seen on the parvis of Notre-Dame.

The moment of decision is identical. The city council on the evening of the collapse. Cacciari while the theatre was still smoking. Macron in front of the cameras, promising a reopening within five years. Always a political choice made in the heat of the moment, before the specialists can have their say, and always with the same purpose: to show that the community can get back on its feet. The monument serves as proof. The result is faithful to the image every time, and unfaithful to the material.

On rebuilding what was lost, then, we did the same thing, and we did it more than a century earlier.

The difference lies downstream. In Italy, *com'era, dov'era* always stopped at what had been destroyed. It occurred to no one in Venice to clean the Basilica to make it look new while the campanile was being rebuilt, or to take out intact windows and replace them with contemporary works. The replica concerned what was lost; what survived stayed old, dirty, layered. In Paris, rebuilding what was lost brought with it the remaking of what had survived.

And there is a difference in temperature. We made those choices and have gone on arguing about them for more than a century. In France, the tradition going back to Viollet-le-Duc allows the intervention to be claimed as a legitimate project, and indeed the administration claimed it, to the point of overriding the opposing opinion of its own expert body. It is a more coherent position than ours. Not necessarily a more just one.

## Who walks in

That leaves the simplest objection, which is also the hardest to dismantle. People like these restorations.

![The long arcaded façade of the Procuratie on Piazza San Marco with crowds of visitors along the bottom](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/03-procuratie-piazza-san-marco-crowd.jpg)

The Procuratie, and the crowd beneath them.

Notre-Dame counted around eleven million visitors in the twelve months after reopening, more than it had before the fire. St Mark's Campanile is deeply loved. La Fenice has become once again the theatre the Venetians wanted. A clean, legible building communicates at once; a building preserved in all its layers asks the visitor to know how to read it, and anyone without the tools sees only a dark church.

![A handwritten chalkboard among plants in Venice listing 49,365 residents and 49,272 tourist beds in June 2023](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/04-venice-residents-tourist-beds-sign.jpg)

A chalkboard among the flowers on a Venetian balustrade, June 2023: 49,365 residents, 49,272 tourist beds. "Venice without inhabitants dies."

It is a discomfort that concerns the school I identify with, and one we rarely turn a critical eye on. The critical-conservative doctrine presupposes a public able to tell the original from the integration and to appreciate the difference. When that public isn't there, minimum intervention is read as neglect and recognisability as sloppiness.

I go back to that evening in the square. The advantage of having studied these things is not seeing a more beautiful campanile: it is seeing a different one, and knowing that the difference exists. These are not glasses you buy; they are glasses you lend. And it is the only answer I have to the problem of the ordinary visitor. Our doctrine doesn't need softening to be understood. It needs someone to tell people what they are seeing, instead of taking it for granted and then complaining that nobody understands.

Because what is at stake is not taste. A building that is too clean slowly stops being a document and becomes an image of itself: beautiful, shareable, and silent about everything that happened in between.

The next time something collapses in Italy, and it will, the formula will arrive by nightfall. As in 1902, as in 1996\. Before repeating it, it would be worth asking which "was" we are talking about.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-campo-santi-giovanni-e-paolo-scuola-grande-san-marco.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-calle-gateway.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-canal-boats.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-canal-gondola.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-canal-gondola-fondamenta.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-canal-red-palazzo.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-gothic-palazzo-water-doors.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-narrow-canal.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-venice-palazzo-grand-canal.jpg)

The city around the campanile.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g2-bridge-of-sighs-venice.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g2-doges-palace-scala-dei-giganti.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g2-venice-canal-through-stone-window.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g2-venice-painted-ceiling.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g2-venice-window-view-lagoon.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g2-view-to-san-giorgio-maggiore-over-the-molo.jpg)

Inside and around the Doge's Palace, and a window on the lagoon.

---

## Visiting

You go up the campanile by lift, installed in 1932, and the queue in high season is long: book online or turn up at opening time. It is worth looking at the tower closely before you go up, searching for the old stone parts set back in among the new bricks. You can see them, if you know they are there.

La Fenice can be visited with an audio guide almost every day, but the right way is to buy a ticket for any performance at all. A theatre rebuilt to be used should be judged while it is being used.

## Further reading

Cesare Brandi, [*Theory of Restoration*.](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/slow-library/) The book that founded the Italian way of thinking about these things, and you can read it in a week. The chapter on the historical fake is the one that matters here. It exists in English translation.

Giovanni Carbonara, *La reintegrazione dell'immagine*, if you want to understand how the Roman school updated Brandi without betraying him. His *Trattato di restauro architettonico*, eleven volumes, is the mother ship: you don't read it, you consult it for a lifetime. Both in Italian.

On the campanile, the Ateneo Veneto's material on the centenary exhibition is the best starting point, because it brings together the collapse, the council resolution and the controversies without taking sides. In Italian.

Viollet-le-Duc, the entry *Restauration* in the *Dictionnaire raisonné*. A few pages, and better read than quoted from hearsay, as I have been doing myself for years.

Translations of quotations from Italian are my own.