Professed house, Venice

In 1657 the Republic of Venice sold the Jesuits a whole block in Cannaregio, a church, a hospital and a convent, for 50,000 ducats. The order had been expelled from Venice in 1606, during a quarrel between the Republic and Pope Paul V, and was only now allowed back. The buildings had belonged to the Crociferi, an old order of hospital friars that the pope had just dissolved. The Jesuits set up their professed house in the convent.

Between 1715 and 1729 the architect Domenico Rossi rebuilt the church, paid for by the Manin family, Friulian nobles. Inside, the pillars are inlaid with green and white marble cut to look like hanging damask. In the first chapel on the left hangs the treasure the Jesuits inherited with the site. Titian's Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence was painted in the late 1550s for the Crociferi church, commissioned by Lorenzo Massolo and his wife Elisabetta Querini, a Venetian patrician couple. It is a night scene, with the saint on his gridiron lit from below by the fire and from above by a break of light. Philip II of Spain later ordered a second version for the Escorial.

The Jesuits were suppressed in 1773, and the old convent beside the church went on to serve other purposes, among them a barracks. Restored in a project completed in 2013, it is now a residence for students and researchers, with its cloister and garden open again.