The Venetian Piazetta, with the Doge's Palace dating from the fourteenth century to its east and the Libreria Sansovino, begun in 1537 by Jacopo Sansovino and finished by Vicenzo Scamozzi to its west, links St Mark's and the Piazza San Marco to the waterfront of the Lagoon on the Bacino de San Marco. Close to the waterfront are two monolithic granite columns looted from the eastern Mediterranean by the Doge Vitali Mickiel II and erected in the Piazetta towards the end of the twelfth century. One carries a Hellenistic chimera from the fourth century BC transformed into the winged lion, symbol of St Mark. The other bears a statue of St Theodore, predecessor of St Mark as patron saint of Venice, and his dragon. The torso is a Roman fragment from the reign of the emperor Hadrian and the head a portrait statue in Parian marble. In his diary entry for 9 May 1841, Ruskin claims that 'a single passage of the grand canal or the Piazetta [is] worth all of Rome and Naples together' ( Evans and Whitehouse, The Diaries of John Ruskin, Volume I, 185). In St Mark's Rest (1877-84) he instructs the visitor to Venice to 'Go first into the Piazetta and stand anywhere in the shade, where you can well see its granite pillars' ( Works, 24.207).