Before the institution of the office of doge on the Venetian lagoons, civil and military power was exercised by the Byzantine magister militum to whom the tribunes, who administered the various islands, were accountable.

The island of San Cristoforo, located in the Venetian lagoon near the island of Murano, housed the church of the same name, which was destroyed in 1810 to accommodate the city cemetery.

In order to understand the importance and motivations of what Tommaseo read in the nineteenth-century Ateneo Veneto in what is now the room that bears his name, we need to take a few small steps back for a brief overview of the situation related t