Campo Santa Margherita

This guide to Campo Santa Margherita in Venice opens with a group of socialists who, one night in 1913, half as a joke, declared this square the independent Republic of Santa Margherita, handing local fishermen and dockworkers mock titles of doge and magistrate at the Osteria da Capon. It traces how the long, irregular square took its wandering shape from canals filled in over time, and the squat bell tower at its north end, the last remnant of a ninth-century church with Byzantine mosaics, suppressed under Napoleon and later gutted into a university lecture hall. Look up at that truncated tower and picture the church that used to surround it.