The Civil Hospital of Santi Giovanni e Paolo is one of the largest monumental complexes in the city; it is also an architectural-artistic compendium that spans almost nine centuries; it is a moral and medical-scientific reality that is indispensable for knowing and experiencing the extraordinary Venetian civilization. In fact, inside it there is the hospital world of contemporary care but also the world of culture, history, art, spirituality.
The sixteenth-century Hospital of San Lazzaro with its original double-facade church overlooks the Rio dei Mendicanti; on the Campo Ss. Giovanni e Paolo instead the most beautiful Renaissance facade of a secular Venetian building is reflected, this is one of the most important urban spaces with the large Dominican Basilica of the thirteenth century and the astonishing equestrian monument by Andrea Del Verrocchio, Leonardo's teacher.
Through a sumptuous porch (formerly the triumphal entrance of the medieval Scuola Grande di San Marco) one has accessed the Civil Hospital of Venice for two hundred years. It is a complex of personal care and assistance that has marked the history of Italian and European medicine, from the era of the lazarettos and the first anatomical dissections onwards.