On the side of the deconsecrated church of Sant’Antonin in Castello, there is something which looks like an odd bricked up opening, but it doesn’t really look like a window nor a doorway.
The opening was made on March 16th, 1819, with the permission of the Patriarch, because of a slight problem with an elephant.
The carnival of 1819
Exotic animals were not unusual in Venice during carnival time, like we have seen in a previous Venetian Story about the rhinoceros Clara.
This elephant had belonged to Frederick I of the Kingdom of Württemberg in Germany. It had apparently lived there for some time, and had been cared for.
An eyewitness who saw the elephant in Venice stated that:
The elephant was very docile, and very intelligent, in that it obeyed immediately the orders of its handler, as would a child.
and
The elephant obeyed precisely the orders of its handler who always spoke to him in French, and, in fact, the elephant understood no other language.
When Frederick I died in 1816, the elephant was sold to a man, which our source names as a Claudio Garner from “Gauter Corout” in Sweden. The animal’s handler was a young man from Rovigo, Camillo Rosa.
The two travelled with the elephant, and came to Venice for the 1819 carnival.
The animal was put on display on the Riva degli Schiavoni during the festivities.
When the carnival was over, they tried to get the elephant to board a trabaccolo, which is a rather large cargo boat.
The owner had bought the boat to transport the beast quickly to Lombardy by river, for another large fair.
However, every time they tried to get it on board, as soon as the elephant put its front legs on the boat, it would tip, and the frightened animal backed off again.
A huge crowd had gathered, and the elephant became unruly. Then an overloaded boat with curious spectators capsized, and numerous persons finished in the cold water. By pure luck, there were no fatalities, but the chaos was such that they had to give up moving the animal that day.
The elephant was taken to a building nearby, so it could spend the night inside, away from the crowds.
Elephant on the rampage
The next morning, the handler Camillo Rosa used a loaf of bread to coax the animal outside, and down to the boat again.
Initially, it went quite well, but then the animal got annoyed when it didn’t get the food. It curled its trunk around the neck of the young man, flattened him to the ground, trampled him, and ran away.
Camillo Rosa died four hours later of his injuries.
The fleeing elephant passed the Ponte del Sepolcro, and overturned a wooden hut and a fruit stand, where it stopped for a while to eat some of the fruit.
It then entered a nearby café, where it stayed for long enough for some armed guards to arrive. They shot at it, but the bullets only gave it some scratches.
The animal escaped, down the Calle del Dose, across the Campo della Bragora, into the Salizada Pignater, and here it entered the Calle del Forno Vecchio.
That alleyway is a cul-de-sac — there is no exit.
When the guards arrived, the elephant knocked down a door, entered a small courtyard, where it somehow broke the vera da pozzo — the well-head.
The guards opened fire, and the beast tried to climb a wooden stair, which collapsed under its weight.
The Calle del Forno Vecchio was a place where mostly poor people lived, and the barrage of bullets penetrated a wooden door, and whistled just over the heads of a poor mother and her four children who were sleeping in there.
They weren’t hurt, but they probably didn’t expect to wake up by being fired at by a platoon of the Austrian military because there was a rampaging elephant in their courtyard.
Try to use that as an excuse, next time you’re late for something 🙂
The elephant fell to the ground, and for a split second the soldiers believed they had killed it. Then it got up again, and made a run for it.
In the church
This time it went back down the Salizada Pignater, along the Salizada Sant’Antonin, and when it came to the canal at the end, it turned around, and crashed into the church.
The animal rummaged around inside the church for just long enough for the guards to barricade all the doors from the outside.
The elephant was contained for the moment, but what now?
Inside, the probably both wounded and frightened animal ran around, broke many of the pews, and some of the marble slabs of the floor.
At some point, the elephant stepped on the marble slab covering a tomb under the church floor. The stone broke, and the elephant fell backwards into the tomb.
Outside, the time had been used to get hold of the Patriarch, whose church it was, and soldiers had arrived with a small cannon.
They made a hole in the wall, just behind the animal, which was still struggling to get out of the tomb. The cannon was pointed inside through the opening, and two cannonballs at point-blank range put the beast out of its misery.
What to do with a dead elephant?
The dead animal was lying inside the church in a huge pool of blood.
The elephant weighted 4622 Venetian large pounds (libre grosse), which is around 2.2 tons, not accounting for the spilled blood.
Cleaning up took quite some time. The carcass was taken to a deconsecrated church on the Giudecca for a scientific autopsy.
Afterwards, the hide and the skeleton were sold to the University of Padua, while the rest of the poor animal was buried in a rubbish dump on the Lido.
The hide was disposed of in the early 1900s, as it apparently hadn’t been conserved properly. The skeleton is on display in the natural history museum in Padua.
Bibliography
Bonmartini, Pietro. L’elefanticidio in Venezia dell’anno 1819 del nobile signor Pietro Bonmartini Padovano. Venezia tipografia Andreola, 1819.
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