Its roots lay in the preaching of an itinerant canon regular, Bartolomeo of Rome, who was a proponent of the new spirituality of the Devotio Moderna which had developed in the Low Countries and was starting to spread in northern Italy.
In 1404 they were given the use of a monastery of Augustinian friars on the isolated island of St. George in Alga, which was almost empty, by its commendatory prior, a young nobleman, Ludovico Barbo, who soon himself joined the community.
[1] In 1408 Pope Gregory appointed Barbo to be the abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, which he reformed with help of two monks, two Camaldolese novices and three canons of San Giorgio in Alga.
Pope Gregory XII called his nephew Antonio Correr and Gabriele Condulmer to Rome to serve as cardinals.
Condulmer later became Pope Eugene IV and Giustiniani became the first Patriarch of Venice, promoting the reform of the city and the spread of the Gospel throughout his episcopate.
Finally, in 1688, the monastery of San Giorgio was suppressed and its property was confiscated and sold off to raise money for the defense of the Republic of Venice against the Ottoman Empire.