Feeding Pigeons, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Feeding Pigeons, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Feeding Pigeons, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-952942

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Feeding the pigeons of Piazza San Marco was, for two or three postwar decades, considered a legitimate tourist activity rather than a public-health concern, and vendors sold grain for exactly this purpose from carts stationed around the square. The man at the center of this scene has gone further than most: he has elevated one bird to face level and is inspecting it the way a man might examine a suspicious invoice, while several dozen of its colleagues work the pavement at his feet in the businesslike manner of creatures who have learned that tourists are the most reliable food source in Europe.

The colonnaded arcade of the Procuratie and the broad stone paving of the piazza place this without ambiguity in Venice in the 1950s, when San Marco was still navigable on foot in summer without the crowd-management systems the city would eventually require. The women behind him are dressed for a proper outing — hat, heels, printed dress — because in 1950s Europe a trip abroad was still an event that called for one's better clothes.

Sometime in the following decades, Venice would ban pigeon feeding entirely, declaring the birds a threat to the stonework. The man holding this particular pigeon at arm's length, studying it with evident satisfaction, had no idea he was participating in a tradition with an expiration date.

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