Santa Maria del Canneto (Pula, Croatia)

The structure was damaged at the time of the Venetian sack of Pola in 1243, and building material was subsequently taken from the ruins and primarily incorporated into the Marciana Library and the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice.

[2] Installed as bishop of Ravenna in 546, Maximianus, a native of Vistar (Veštar) near Pola in Istria, continued the building programme of his predecessors Ecclesius and Ursicinus, completing the Basilicas of San Vitale and Sant'Apollinare in Classe.

But since it was built in a low-lying area of the city near the marshes along the waterfront, it has been customarily known since the twelfth century as Santa Maria del Canneto (Saint Mary of the reeds).

[9][10] Like other churches built in Africa and Italy following the Byzantine reconquest under Justinian, the floor of Santa Maria del Canneto was covered with mosaics.

[11] On the basis of surviving fragments, these mosaics, predominantly green and red, depicted intertwined lilies and lotus flowers together with curvilinear patterns.

[15] The progressive destruction of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Canneto seems to have begun when Pola was plundered at the time of the Venetian conquest of 1243 under the leadership of Giacomo Tiepolo and Leonardo Quirini.

Some art historians maintain that these materials included the four carved alabaster columns that form the ciborium over the high altar in Saint Mark's Basilica.

[21] Concerns for the precarious conditions of the basilica were expressed in 1545 when Nicolò Bernardo, procurator of Saint Mark de supra, instructed the Venetian representative in Pola to nominate surveyors who were to evaluate the nature and the cost of the work that would be needed to consolidate the structure and prevent it from falling into total ruin.

The Venetian architect Tommaso Temanza attests in Vite dei più celebri architetti e scrittori veneziani (1778) that Sansovino took columns and marbles from Santa Maria del Canneto in 1550 and 1551 for Saint Mark's Basilica and the Doge's Palace.

[25] The despoliation is also confirmed in a petition by the citizenry of Pola to the procurators of Saint Mark, dated 1550, in which they request exoneration from the obligation to pay a tribute of one-tenth of the local olive oil production, citing the removal of columns, marbles, porphyry, and serpentinite.

[27] As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the apse, the prothesis and the diaconicon, the bases of the columns, and a portion of the perimeter wall of the original basilica were still reasonably intact as was one of the adjoining lateral chapels.

Given its form and relationship to the principal basilica, as well as the similarities with the fifth-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, it is believed that this chapel was probably built as a tomb: a seventeenth-century description records the presence of the sarcophagus of a bishop.