ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1819, a particularly surreal incident took place in the city of Venice, at a time when the once-powerful Venetian Republic had fallen under the control of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire. At the start of the carnival that year, a live Indian elephant was put on display near the famed Piazza San Marco as the exotic star of a travelling menagerie. To the horror of the adoring crowds, the creature abruptly broke from its shackles, killed its handler and went on a furious rampage through the narrow, labyrinthine streets. After evading its captors for several hours and proving remarkably impervious to gunfire, the frenzied animal barged into the nearby seventh-century Church of Sant’Antonin, where it was finally trapped. Permission from the Patriarch had to be granted before Austrian forces killed the elephant within the holy sanctuary by two blasts of a cannon.1 Yet the beast was not so easily laid to rest.
