Venice, Veneto · 1926 · Prison
At a glance
The prison of Santa Maria Maggiore stands on the western edge of Venice, on ground cleared when the convent of the same name was demolished in 1900. Built through the 1920s and opened in 1926, it replaced the old prison on the Giudecca. On its wall, over a battlemented cornice, a winged lion of Saint Mark holds an open book with three words on it: CVSTODIT PVNIT MONET — it guards, it punishes, it warns.
Key facts
- Built: through the 1920s, on the site of the demolished Santa Maria Maggiore convent
- Opened: 1926
- Replaced: the previous Venetian prison on the Giudecca
- Site history: the convent was pulled down in 1900; the deconsecrated church beside it had become a tobacco factory
- Emblem: a lion of Saint Mark with the motto CVSTODIT PVNIT MONET
- Still in use: Casa Circondariale di Venezia Santa Maria Maggiore
- Coordinates: 45.4353, 12.3178
What you see
The prison presents to the street a long red front with white stone dressings, battlements along the parapet and a taller tower over the entrance — a nineteenth-century idea of a fortress, built in the twentieth. The windows are barred and small, and the whole elevation is designed to be read as what it is.
The piece worth stopping for is the lion. Carved in white stone against the red wall, winged, with a paw on an open book, it is the emblem of the Venetian Republic put on a building of the Italian state. The three words cut into a panel beneath it — guards, punishes, warns — state the purpose of the place without a word wasted.
The prison today
Practical information
- Seen from the public street or canal; the building is in use and not open to visitors.
Sources
- Ministero della Giustizia — Casa Circondariale di Venezia Santa Maria Maggiore
- History of the site: the convent demolished in 1900, the prison built through the 1920s and opened in 1926 in place of the Giudecca prison
Record researched and written by Stefano Vigolo for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →📷 Become a Cultural Heritage Online photographer
Share your photos of places: they stay published under your name as the author. The more they're seen, the more you get noticed — and soon a contest will reward the most appreciated photos.
Log in or sign up free to add a photoRequest to use these images
Each photograph is offered by the person who took it — the seller is the photographer named on the image; Cultural Heritage Online runs the payment and delivers the file on their behalf. Buying gives you the right to use the image in your own project — a website, an article, a presentation — with the file and a written licence. Read the Terms of Sale.
What you receive. The file as it is held in our archive: the photographer's own original, without the Cultural Heritage Online watermark, unretouched and not enlarged. This is a working archive built over many years by many people, so the files differ — some were taken recently, others years ago with the equipment of their time. Older pictures are usually smaller: a camera from fifteen or twenty years ago simply recorded fewer pixels than a phone does today, so the resolution is lower and the print comes out smaller. We say so rather than hide it. The size, weight, format and year of each one are printed below it, and the print size is given at 300 dpi. Nothing is upscaled to make a number look better. Where the picture on this page has been cropped for the layout, the file you receive is the full frame, which may be wider or taller than what you see here.
The perimeter wall
Sold by Photo: Stefano Vigolo
€3.00
4000 × 3000 px · JPG · 4.5 MB
prints 34 × 25 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2011
The prison front from the garden
Sold by Photo: Stefano Vigolo
€3.00
4000 × 3000 px · JPG · 4.6 MB
prints 34 × 25 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2011
The lion of Saint Mark and its motto
Sold by Photo: Stefano Vigolo
€3.00
4000 × 3000 px · JPG · 4.9 MB
prints 34 × 25 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2011