The Festa del Redentore is the votive festival Venice holds every year in thanks for the end of the plague of 1575 to 1577. It falls on the third Sunday of July, which in 2027 is 18 July, and the night everyone comes for is the Saturday before, when fireworks are fired over the Bacino di San Marco for about forty minutes from around 11.30pm.
The festival has three parts. A temporary bridge of boats is laid across the Giudecca canal from the Zattere to the church of the Redentore and opened, with a blessing, on the Friday evening. The Saturday night is the vigil the city calls 'la notte famosissima', spent eating on moored boats and along the banks until the fireworks. The Sunday belongs to the rowing regattas in the Giudecca canal and to the solemn votive mass in the church at 19.00 (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026).
This page sets out the 2027 dates and the pattern the programme follows, what the festival commemorates and how the death toll is actually counted, how the votive bridge is built, where the boats and the fireworks barges go, and what to look at in the Palladian church at the far end of the bridge. Figures come from the diocese, from the city's own account of the bridge, from dated reporting of the 2026 edition, and from peer-reviewed work on the two Venetian plagues and on Palladio's Venetian churches.
When is the Festa del Redentore in 2027?
The date is fixed by the vow, not by the calendar of a tourist office. When the plague was declared definitively beaten on 13 July 1577, Venice decided to mark its deliverance on the third Sunday of July with a religious celebration and a popular festival (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026). In 2027 the third Sunday of July is 18 July, so the vigil night is Saturday 17 July and the votive bridge should open on Friday 16 July. That Sunday is 450 years since the first celebration in 1577.
The 2026 edition shows the shape of the weekend. The bridge was inaugurated and blessed at 19.00 on Friday 17 July at the Riva delle Zattere allo Spirito Santo, the Patriarch crossing it with civil and military authorities, and the solemn mass followed at 19.00 on Sunday 19 July (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026). The fireworks fell on the night of Saturday 18 July.
One practical warning. Access to the banks closest to the fireworks has in recent years been capped and bookable in advance, with the same portal handling moorings for boats, and priority windows for residents ahead of visitors (La Nuova Venezia, 2026). The Comune publishes the detailed programme in early summer, so treat the 2027 times above as the pattern rather than as a schedule, and book as soon as the window opens.
What the festival commemorates: the plague of 1575 to 1577
The plague ran through Venice for roughly two years from 1575. The diocese puts the toll at almost 50,000 dead, more than a third of the population, and records that the Senate resolved on 4 September 1576 that the Doge should pronounce, for everyone, the vow to raise a church to Christ the Redeemer if the city were freed. The promise included an annual act of thanks there on the anniversary of the day Venice was declared free of contagion (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026).
The counted figure is lower than the remembered one. The outbreak of 1575 to 1577 was the first in Venice whose deaths were recorded, and those records give a mortality rate of 27.8 per cent, against 32.5 per cent in the epidemic of 1630 to 1632 (Tran et al., 2011, p. 1). Out in the lagoon, renovation at the Lazzaretto Vecchio in 2004 and 2005 uncovered 92 burial locations holding 5 to 184 individuals each, and DNA from 173 dental pulp samples from 46 graves confirmed Yersinia pestis (Tran et al., 2011, p. 1).
That second epidemic produced the city's other votive church, Santa Maria della Salute. Digitised parish records give 43,088 deaths in all, and the population fell from 141,625 in 1624 to 102,243 in 1633, a drop of 27.81 per cent. The parish transcribed in full there is Sant'Eufemia on the Giudecca, minutes from the Redentore, with 1,785 deaths registered in 1630 and 1631 (Lazzarini et al., 2020, p. 2).
The votive bridge across the Giudecca canal
For the first Redentore in 1577 a bridge of galleys was laid across the canal so that the faithful could walk to the new church, and the procession has been part of the festival ever since. The floats changed over the centuries: galleys gave way to rafts, then to the large flat-bottomed boats that carried coal and timber in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and after the Second World War to a Bailey bridge, which an army pontoon regiment assembled on the Giudecca canal every year for fifty years as a training exercise. The Bailey bridge was declared war surplus in 2002 and replaced by the walkway in use today (Ve.La, 2022).
The modern bridge is about 334 metres long with a walkway about 4 metres wide. The floats are polyethylene modules, the deck and the handrail are still wood, the structure is anchored on steel posts driven into the canal bed, and the parapet carries a lighting system. Some modules stand on pylons to lift the deck into a central passage 3.50 metres high and 10 metres wide, so public transport can pass underneath (Ve.La, 2022).
Assembly runs in stages across several days and gradually closes the canal. In 2022 the final stage began at 07.00 on the Friday, the last ferry went through and the bridge was closed at 16.15, it opened to the public at 20.00, and dismantling began at midnight on the Sunday (Ve.La, 2022).
Where to watch the Redentore fireworks
The fireworks are fired from a line of barges in the middle of the basin. For the 2026 edition 25 pontoons were moored side by side over a length of 420 metres, with nobody aboard and the whole display computer controlled: 5,500 shells and two and a half tonnes of explosive over forty minutes (La Nuova Venezia, 2026).
The water is organised by boat type. Traditional wooden and rowing boats moor at Punta della Dogana, closest to the barges, other craft spread out in front of San Giorgio, and sailing boats, yachts, gondolas and water taxis have their own areas (La Nuova Venezia, 2026). If you are on foot, the Zattere, the Riva degli Schiavoni, Punta della Dogana and the Giudecca fondamenta all look onto the display, and the closest stretches are the ones that need booking. The pine wood at Sant'Elena and the Accademia bridge are the usual fallbacks when the central banks fill.
Two details catch people out. The start has crept earlier: the fireworks once went up at midnight (Marini, 2019, p. 46), and now begin at about 11.30pm. And the evening is a meal before it is a spectacle, eaten on the boats and at long tables on the fondamente: bigoli in salsa, sarde in saor, duck, bovoleti and watermelon (La Nuova Venezia, 2026). Nothing is sold to you on the water, so bring what you plan to eat.
Palladio's Redentore: what to look at
The church at the end of the bridge is the votive temple the vow required, designed by Andrea Palladio (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026) and held by the Capuchin friars (La Nuova Venezia, 2026). The front is the engaged temple facade Palladio made his own, with the central bay stretched: its intercolumniation is roughly 1 to 6, far wider than Vitruvius allowed for a portico (Stroik, 2019, p. 349).
Walk round the side and the classicism gives way to something older. Massive buttresses stand above the dividing walls of each side chapel, holding up the brick barrel vault, absent at San Giorgio Maggiore, where the vaulting is only plaster over wood (Stroik, 2019, p. 355). The flanks and rear are brick and plaster with the stucco coloured brick red, against the marble of the front (Stroik, 2019, pp. 354-355). The statues run in a hierarchy: Faith and two angels on the pediment, Saints Lorenzo Giustiniani and Anthony of Padua on the upper half pediments, Saints Mark and Francis in the niches, the Redeemer on the dome (Stroik, 2019, p. 355).
The two cylindrical bell towers beside the apse are unique in Palladio's work, read both as an echo of the minarets of Istanbul, where his patron here had lived, and of the round Byzantine towers of Ravenna (Stroik, 2019, p. 356). Of his Venetian projects only the San Francesco della Vigna facade was finished in his lifetime; the rest, this church included, were completed after his death (Stroik, 2019, p. 357).
Sunday: the regattas, the mass and how to get there
Sunday is the Venetian half of the festival. The afternoon brings races down the Giudecca canal for the youngest rowers and for men on pupparini, and at 17.30 the first two-oared gondola regatta of the season, which is the event the rowing clubs measure themselves by for the rest of the summer (La Nuova Venezia, 2026).
The solemn mass follows at 19.00 in the church, presided over by the Patriarch, with the city authorities, the Metropolitan Chapter, the nine Congregations of Venetian clergy, the Scuole Grandi and the religious communities of the city. It closes with adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and a eucharistic blessing given to Venice from the steps in front of the church, and it is broadcast on local television and online (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026).
Getting to the Giudecca is easy outside the festival and awkward during it. ACTV line 2 calls at Zitelle, Redentore and Giudecca Palanca, and the crossing from Zattere to Palanca takes four minutes on the published timetable in force from 30 May 2026 (ACTV, 2026b). A standard 75 minute Rete Unica ticket costs 9.50 EUR (ACTV, 2026a). On the festival weekend the votive bridge is the simplest way across, and waterbus routes through the basin are re-timed or diverted while the barges are in place, so allow far longer than the timetable suggests.
The night the basin became a stage
The vigil before the third Sunday of July is called 'la notte famosissima', the most famous night (Patriarcato di Venezia, 2026), and once it was famous for the wrong reasons. On 15 July 1989 a rock concert was staged on rafts in the Bacino di San Marco on the eve of the Redentore, a structure 24 by 96 metres in plan and 24 metres high, moored 200 metres off the Piazzetta with its back to the church of the Redentore. Around 200,000 people came to a free concert planned for 50,000, an audience put at 150 million watched on television in 27 countries, and it was the first rock concert broadcast in East Berlin. The music started at 21.45, was cut to the 90 minutes television required, with nine of the twenty-three songs dropped, and the usual fireworks followed (Marini, 2019, p. 41).
The morning after, the local paper ran a photograph of Piazza San Marco under a layer of rubbish beneath the front-page line 'Mai piu cosi', never again like this. Street cleaners struck in the days that followed, public transport had struck on the night itself, and the crowd had walked (Marini, 2019, p. 43).
That night is why the modern festival is managed the way it is: numbered sectors on the water, booked places on the banks, hundreds of police, fire and civil protection staff on duty, and a deliberate effort to keep amplified music and outside boats out of the traditional fleet (La Nuova Venezia, 2026).
