📍Riva degli Schiavoni, Castello, 30122 Venice, Italy
1678 – 1741“I was born Antonio Lucio Vivaldi on the 4th of March 1678 in Venice, the son of Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a barber and violinist. Venice was the most musical city in the world at the end of the seventeenth century — the opera houses, the church music, the instrumental tradition of the Basilica di San Marco — and I grew up inside all of it. I was ordained as a priest in 1703 but almost immediately received dispensation from saying Mass due to a chest ailment. I spent most of my career as violin teacher and composer at the Ospedale della Pietà — an orphanage for illegitimate girls that maintained one of the finest musical ensembles in Europe. I wrote over five hundred concertos, forty operas, and quantities of sacred music. The Four Seasons was composed for the Pietà girls. Venice was my world and I almost never left it.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Talbot, M. Vivaldi (1978), Dent; Heller, K. Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest of Venice (1997, translated David Marinelli), Amadeus Press