Scuoli di San Marco

In the square near the Scuola di San Marco (now a public hospital) at the beginning of the 16th century, a tragic story played out:

Not far from Scuola lived a woman who had a child by a Levantine merchant. The Levant belonged to Turkey, and the Levantine, using the privileges of merchants, settled comfortably on Giudecca. His son also lived with him. Nevertheless, he periodically visited his mother and usually beat her, tormented by his own nature as a half-Venetian, half-Levantine, rejected by both societies. The woman dutifully endured his outbursts of violence: she accepted her son as he was.

But one evening everything changed. In a fit of anger, which had never happened to him before, the young man stabbed his mother and literally tore the heart out of her chest. Blinded by rage and horror of what he had done, he rushed to run like a man possessed, clutching his mother's heart in his hand. When he reached the bridge in front of the Skuola, he stumbled and dropped his heart. His heart sank to the ground and suddenly turned to him with the voice of a mother: "My son, is something wrong?"

In despair, the young man, suddenly realizing what he had done, ran to the bay opposite the cemetery and threw himself together with his mother's heart into the icy waters. Hospital workers say that on cold winter nights you can still hear him crying when the soul of a young man is looking for his mother's heart, longing for the warmth of love.