The church of San Martino Vescovo is the mother church of Sottomarina, a district of Chioggia, and is made up of two buildings, one from the eighteenth century and one from the early twentieth. The first church of Sottomarina, of the twelfth century, was destroyed in 1379 by the Genoese during the War of Chioggia; after that conflict Venice forbade building outside the walls, and the area, the ancient Clodia minor, remained uninhabited.
What to see
In 1712, while working in the vegetable plots, people found the ruins of the old church by chance, and the wish to rebuild it grew: the new church opened for worship on 3 August 1715 and was consecrated in 1801. By the mid-nineteenth century it had become too small for the population: the first stone of the present church was laid on 8 December 1859, but work soon stopped and only resumed in 1898, ending in 1900. The eighteenth-century church, left without a ceiling, is now a meeting place for the parish youth centre; during restoration completed in 2009 the foundations of the twelfth-century church, oriented east to west, came to light. Its portal is topped by a statue of Saint Martin.
The new church has a neoclassical façade with a pediment supported by four giant Ionic columns. The bell tower, 27 metres high and built around 1730, has carried since 1865 on its west side the face of a clock that came from the town hall of Chioggia; until 1913 it had a dome, demolished after a lightning strike. Inside, almost all the altars come from the eighteenth-century church: that of the Madonna di Marina, of 1608, comes from the sanctuary of the Navicella, and on its Carrara marble base two kneeling angels hold the case of the «zocco», the stump of the apparition, which is now in the basilica of San Giacomo.
Visiting
The church is in Sottomarina and was restored between 1997 and 2000. Opening and service times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
At the sides of the choir look at the two canvases with stories of Saint Martin of Tours painted in the thirties of the twentieth century by Monsignor Umberto Voltolina: kept in storage from 1968, they returned to their place in December 2025.
