I go on with the tour until the Madonna Nicopeia chapel, along the right nave: it is a byzantine icon, object of devotion, that came to Venice after the Fourth Crusade. This one too! Under the icon an empty hole and, further down, a sentence, firmly carved in the marble:
Hic Iulianus fuit.
Here was Julian.
There, I found it! It is certainly referring to the dear emperor. Julian hadn’t been sold as some Christian martyr, but they preserved his remains in a special recess with his name on. Maybe as a reminder of his failure in trying to reinstate paganism they decided to lay the Apostate in a Christian church, or maybe in the Middle Ages the name of Julien hadn’t been connected to the emperor enemy of Christianity; they might have thought it belonged to one of the Saints.
I inspect the r
