Frammento della parte alta della Chiesa Santa Maria della Maddalena

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In the heart of Cannaregio hides a small Venetian Pantheon that made contemporaries cry out in scandal in the 18th century. The Chiesa della Maddalena is not just a church: it is an architectural manifesto, a daring neoclassical experiment in a city still in love with Baroque.

When architect Tommaso Temanza completely demolished the old medieval church and rebuilt it on a circular plan, few imagined that he was creating one of the most innovative buildings in 18th century Venice. A hemispherical dome reminiscent of the Roman Pantheon, an interior geometrically transformed from a circle to a hexagon, works by Giandomenico Tiepolo (including a fresco hidden for two centuries and rediscovered only in 2005): this small church tells the story of a change of epoch, when Venice looked to the ancient to reinvent its architectural language.

From its medieval origins linked to the Baffo family to the Enlightenment symbolism debate that still divides scholars, La Maddalena is a concentration of history, art and architectural mystery that deserves to be discovered beyond legends.

Seen from the outside, the Magdalena church is immediately striking for its cylindrical shape clad in white marble, crowned by a hemispherical dome. Temanza was explicitly inspired by the Roman Pantheon, even taking up its external steps that give vertical momentum to the circular mass of the building.The church, however, was not always of this form. In fact, De' Barbari's plan from 1500 shows a typically medieval structure: a gabled façade, apse overlooking the canal, and a squat square bell tower with a belfry opened by triple lancet windows. A building that, although enlarged over the centu

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