It's not always the oldest, nor even older, of Venice's infinite array of architectural elements that stop you in your tracks... The old
Centro Provinciale dell'Igiene (Provincial Center of Hygiene) actually counts as one of the city's "newest" buildings (relatively speaking): now the site of some administrative offices of the Università IUAV, the old health center was built in the early 1940s, and while there are still a number of public monuments around the city in the Fascist style, the lettering and simplified "populist" figures of this facade made me think of Bolshevik design--though perhaps mistakenly, I'll admit.
I've lived here for over 8 years and only passed by this building for the first time last week on my way to Piazzale Roma. The lettering alone deserves more attention than I had time to give it--as the image below is just a detail of the image above.
Not to mention the stylized winged lions of San Marco on either
side of the entrance (below) which, as far as I've seen, are unique to this one
facade. The only vaguely similar frontal, foreshortened
views of the lion have been used in the logos of at least a couple of
the recent incarnations of Venice's
professional calcio teams--but none of them has been so stark as on this facade.
