Venice - Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa Dei Frari

Basilica of Santa Maria Glorios dei Frari

I'm told it's good to wander in Venice.  So we did.  Our hotel is in the San Polo sistiere (district), so we wandered around San Polo, down its fondamenta* and a few of its calle* and crossed some ponte* and ducked under some sotoportego,* while we admired all the rios.*  And while we were doing all that we came across one of the main attractions of this neighborhood, the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.  It is certainly not as showy as the big headlining Basilica di San Marco, but it is full of surprises.  I guess that shouldn't be surprising, because this church has been around in some form since 1231, when Franciscan monks (friars) first built a convent and church on the land, and a lot can happen in eight hundred years. The present basilica was dedicated in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Monument dedicated to Doge Giovanni Pesaro.
He's on the second level, backed by red marble. 

The friar's basilica is best known for its centerpiece of the ascension of Mary, painted by perhaps Venice's most famous painter, Titian, and completed in 1518.  (Titian later died of the plague and is buried in this basilica, with his own grand mausoleum.)  This painting is worthy of pages of prose as the "most precious jewel" of this basilica.  What I was not expecting were all the tributes to the Venetian doges (dukes) that intersperse the images of Mary and Jesus.  Some of that is explained by money.  The doges had a lot of it, and commissioned fabulous altar pieces and monuments.  For example, Doge Giovanni Pesaro spent 12,000 ducats on his monument.  I'm not sure how much that amounted to in 1665, when his monument was dedicated, but I read that it was twice what he gave to the Venetian republic to fight off the Turks.  He is pictured addressing his audience, above two dragons, held up by four suffering Moorish slaves.

*
fondamenta = streets bordering the canals
calle = alley (calleta = extremely narrow alley)
ponte = bridge
sotoportego = underpass connecting alleys, streets and squares, usually created by removing the ground floor of houses
rio = small canal 
(All street names in Venice are in Venetian, now considered a dialect of Italian, but for hundreds of years considered the "lingua franca" of trade, especially in the Mediterranean.)