San Moisè Church in Venice

It should not really come as a surprise that there are a lot of churches in Venice. This is Italy after all, and home of Rome where the head of the Catholic Church resides. However, what was surprising to me was the for such a tiny island, it has an incredible number of churches, most than 100 of them in fact. You can probably walk a couple of blocks and see another church. In fact, some of the churches were bizarrely built right next to each other. I don’t see how this could have helped, but this might be back then when the Catholic Church didn’t exactly have the best of reputations. Vast majority of these churches are Catholic churches but there is a smattering of other denominations here and there.

It would be an interesting activity to try to hunt down all of these churches in Venice. Given that you probably don’t need to travel very far to visit the vast majority of them. I will not be attempting something like that but I will only take photos of some churches which we pass by. We came across this church which was quite elaborate. It had a white baroque design in the exterior. This was San Moisè Church or Saint Moses Church. This is probably the first time I have heard of Saint Moses, but this Moses is the same Moses as the one in the Old Testament. The Venetians tended to canonize the Old Testament prophets while the main Catholic church only started with the New Testament, I always wondered why that was the case after all there are a lot of figures in the bible who were worthy to be named saints.

It is possible to go in the San Moisè Church but it was not allowed to take photos in there. Maybe they should have a fence where people who don’t attend the services would enter, but then there would the issue of noise, so I guess it is for the best. My companions are probably sick visiting all these churches ever since we got here. I can’t even remember how many we have seen since the start of the trip.

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