On Calle del Piovan, a few steps from Campo San Maurizio, a sculpted facade tells the story of a people in flight: this was the Scuola di Santa Maria e San Gallo degli Albanesi, the confraternity of the Albanians of Venice — a ’scuola’ (confraternity), because it was not just a place of worship but of meeting, study and mutual aid. The Albanians — barbers, bakers and sailors driven here by the Ottoman advance in the Balkans — obtained it with difficulty in the mid-15th century; the facade you see dates from 1531, with the Madonna between St Gall and St Maurice and, above, an image unique in the city: the sultan Mehmed II besieging the castle of Scutari — the fortress that resisted him in 1474 and that the Venetians ceded to him by treaty only in 1479, when the Turks planted the crescent moon on it. And of the community, faithful to the Republic that had welcomed it, place names remain too: more than one calle degli Albanesi in the city preserves the name of its inhabitants.