Once Venice was considered the city of music. You could hear music being played anywhere and on any occasion, both in traditional places like theatres and churches and in less common ones like private dwellings and hospitals. Valuable instruments were produced in Venice, and the first publishing house for music scores was here founded.

Nowadays, there are only some traces left of the past grandeur.

Our tour starts introducing the musical tradition linked to social assistance: we will visit the Church of the Pietà, designed by Giorgio Massari to host the concerts and sonatas of Antonio Vivaldi, and frescoed by Giambattista Tiepolo. Nearby, there’s the small museum of Music where touching documents tell us the stories of the putte, the women, that would sing and play in the choir.

The itinerary continues with a visit to the Hall of Music in the church and hospital of Santa Maria dei Derelitti frescoed by Jacopo Guarana, one of the hidden treasures in Venice.

At the end, we will visit the main opera house in Venice, the Fenice Theatre: entertainment during the Carnival season but also political uprising and awareness at the time of the Hapsburg domination will be the theme of the visit, to understand how the theatre developed itself and its social function in the past.