"Plague Carnival"

To the locals of Venice, Carnival was not actually the most important festival. That honor belonged to the Savior Festival on the third weekend of July and the Gondola Festival on the first Sunday of September.

After the plague of 1630, people built the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. In 1576, the Black Death ravaged Venice and claimed fifty thousand lives. The Doge petitioned God on behalf of the people to end the plague and promised that a grand church would be built afterward. That church was the present-day Church of the Redeemer on Giudecca Island.

Venice still had resources to spare at the time. It took only eighteen years to build a church on Giudecca Island nearly as large as the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, whereas the latter took more than fifty years and was not completed until its designer, Baldassare Longhena, had died of old age.

From the age of thirty-three until he was past eighty, a man spent the finest years of his life accompanying the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. Young men in their twenties were certainly youthful, strong, and energetic, but they were also rash, impulsive, and careless.

By their thirties, people had matured in every respect, reaching the best period of both mind and body. Was it not a pity that Baldassare Longhena did not spend that energy on a living woman, but on a cold, lifeless building?

That was why the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute was one of the most photogenic churches in Europe. It condensed a man's lifelong devotion, and both men and women found it dignified and magnificent.

In the eyes of the American writer Henry James, the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute was like a noblewoman standing at the entrance to a salon.