1806 was a dramatic year for the Church in Venice.
Almost all the monasteries and convents in the city were suppressed and
their goods taken over by the state. The Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy
thus completed a move begun several years earlier with the Provisional
Municipality’s first measures. As a consequence the repression of the
Catholic Church and its property reached a climax. The Benedictine
Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, the wealthiest and best endowed
monastery in the lagoon was also suppressed, its goods confiscated, and
the monks forced to move to the abbey of Santa Giustina, Padua. Thanks
to the last book of the Cronaca, luckily salvaged and later
rediscovered, the last three years of life of the monastery have been
reconstructed and framed in the historical and environmental context of
events in Venice and Europe.

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