Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta

The Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta stands on the island of Torcello in the Venice lagoon. It ranks among the oldest religious buildings in the Veneto. Isaac, exarch of Ravenna, founded it in 639, when Torcello still rivalled the young settlement that would become Venice. A work of late Paleochristian architecture, it served as the cathedral of the Diocese of Torcello. Two great rebuildings shaped the church you enter today.

Bishop Adeodatus the Second directed the first campaign in 864, adding the two side apses, stepped clergy seating and a crypt. Bishop Otto Orseolo, whose father was Doge of Venice, completed the second campaign in 1008. That rebuilding raised the nave, opened windows in the west wall and built the arcade supporting the clerestory. The façade has twelve semi-columns joined by arches and a central marble portal from around the year 1000. A narthex, or entrance hall, stands before it, and the front portico was enlarged in the fourteenth century. Beside the basilica stand the martyrion of Santa Fosca and an eleventh-century bell tower. Inside, a marble pavement runs beneath the throne of the bishops of Altino and the sepulchre of Saint Heliodorus, their first bishop. The church is accessible to wheelchair users.

The mosaics are the earliest surviving in the Venice area, and Byzantine mosaicists made them in the late eleventh century. In the main apse the Virgin Hodegetria stands against a gold background, with a row of saints beneath her. A century later, after an earthquake, mosaicists reworked the central figure, while those saints are original. The west wall above the door holds a Crucifixion in the gable and a Harrowing of Hell with a large Christ. A Last Judgement fills the four lower registers. Among the relics kept here is the skull of Saint Cecilia.