A walk with 57 stops, from St Mark's Square to Piscina del Forner.
The stops
- St Mark's Square
It is the only space in Venice called ’Piazza’ - all the others are campi (Venetian squares) - because it wanted to be unique even in name.
- Portico of the Napoleonic Wing (Ala Nuovissima)
The short side of St Mark’s Square, opposite the Basilica, is closed off by the Ala Nuovissima, known as the Napoleonic Wing.
- Calle Seconda dell'Ascensione
From the Ala Napoleonica (Napoleonic Wing) of St Mark’s Square a little calle (street) descends towards San Moisè, parallel to the busier Calle Larga: it is the Calle Seconda dell’Ascensione, and its name is the tombstone of a vanished church.
- Calle del Ridotto
A name that is a whole programme in itself: this narrow calle (a narrow Venetian street) behind San Moisè is called ’del Ridotto’ because here, in the 17th century, the Serenissima concentrated the city’s gambling.
- Ca' Giustinian
Just beyond the basin of San Marco, looking onto the Grand Canal, rises one of the last Gothic facades built in Venice: Ca’ Giustinian, erected around 1471 for the powerful family that had also given the city its first patriarch, Lorenzo Giustiniani.
- The Church of San Moisè and the Ridotto
A stone’s throw from St Mark’s Square, the church of San Moise flaunts one of the most talked-about facades in Venice: a Baroque triumph of marbles, statues and cenotaphs that John Ruskin despised as a ’manifestation of unusual atheism’.
- Calle Larga XXII Marzo
A broad, straight, porticoed street a stone’s throw from St Mark’s: in a city of winding calli (streets) it almost seems a mistake — and indeed it is a deliberate wound.
- Calle delle Ostreghe
Ostreghe means oysters: the calle, bridge and fondamenta on the rio de l’Alboro probably took their name from the oyster trade that once took place here.
- Campo Santa Maria del Giglio and its Church
At the end of Calle Larga XXII Marzo, a Venetian street, the Campo di Santa Maria del Giglio opens up. In Venetian it is called Zobenigo, after the Iubanico family who founded it in the 10th century.
- Palazzo Gritti
Opposite the Salute basilica, at the entrance to the Campiello del Traghetto di Santa Maria del Giglio, Palazzo Pisani Gritti is one of the most illustrious houses on the Grand Canal: an early 15th-century building, it once had a façade entirely covered in frescoes — a work that the old guidebooks even attributed to Giorgione.
- Palazzo Venier
At the end of Campo Santa Maria del Giglio (a Venetian square), where the square opens onto the Grand Canal at the Campiello del Traghetto, stands a palazzo known by two names: Palazzo Venier, after the family who built it, and Palazzo Venier Contarini, also called Marin Contarini, after later owners.
- Campiello del Traghetto
The last stretch of Campo Santa Maria del Giglio (a Venetian square) towards the Grand Canal has a name that is a trade: Campiello del Traghetto (a campiello is a small square), because here there is still the gondola stazio (a licensed gondola rank) and one of the last rowing traghetti (gondola ferries) crossing the canal, all the way to the Calle del Tragheto of San Gregorio.
- Palazzo Grimani
On campo Santa Maria del Giglio (a campo is a square), a step from the traghetto (gondola ferry) that runs down to the Grand Canal, number 2473 shows a 16th-century Lombardesque facade: it is Palazzo Grimani, house of one of the branches of the great lineage that gave Venice doges, cardinals and patriarchs.
- Palazzo Malipiero (della Feltrina)
Behind the church of Santa Maria del Giglio opens a tiny campiello, one of those secret shelters that Venice gives to those who leave the beaten paths.
- Palazzo Corner della Ca' Grande
On the right bank of the Grand Canal, between the Casina delle Rose and the rio di San Maurizio (a small canal), Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande interrupts the rhythm of the Gothic houses with a mass of Roman stone: rusticated stonework on the ground floor, Ionic and Corinthian orders on the piani nobili, wide terrace-loggias where voids prevail over solids.
- Palazzo Zaguri
Closing Campo San Maurizio to the east stands one of the finest private Gothic buildings in Venice: Palazzo Zaguri, born as Palazzo Pasqualini between the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century, at the wish of a family of rich silk merchants come from Milan.
- Campo San Maurizio
A broad campo (square) with an aristocratic air, just a short walk from Santo Stefano yet away from the tourist crowds.
- Church of San Maurizio
Campo San Maurizio (a Venetian square) retains an aristocratic calm just a few steps from the crowds around St Mark’s.
- Palazzo Bellavite
In Campo San Maurizio, at number 2760, the classical-style palazzo that Dionisio Bellavite — a flour and oil merchant — had raised in the early 16th century on the site of the church’s old bell tower — in 1564 Bellavite was still paying a rent to San Maurizio for that demolished bell tower — has a secret that can no longer be seen: its façade was painted by Paolo Veronese — four coloured scenes and two in chiaroscuro of Roman history, among friezes of putti and allegorical figures — and nothing of that cycle remains, as of almost all the painted façades of Venice.
- Palazzo Molin
On Campo San Maurizio, in one of the airiest campi of San Marco, Palazzo Molin is in fact a pair of almost twin 15th-century buildings, each with its ogival four-light window on the piano nobile.
- Palazzo Da Ponte
In Calle del Dose, a stone’s throw from Campo San Maurizio and the rio di Santo Stefano, stands the rich, correct classical façade — ’not licentious’, Fontana used to say — of Palazzo Da Ponte, erected in the second half of the 16th century for Doge Nicolò Da Ponte (1578-1585) and attributed by 19th-century scholars to none other than Sansovino.
- La Casetta Rossa e lo Studio di Canova
On the bank of the Grand Canal, between the Accademia and Santa Maria del Giglio, you immediately notice a small low house all in red, with a little garden that reaches down to the water — an absolute rarity on the big canal.
- La Scuola degli Albanesi
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.
- Campo Santo Stefano and the Tommaseo Monument
Campo Santo Stefano — which the street signs call Campo Francesco Morosini — is one of the largest campi (squares) in Venice: a long L-shaped square that runs from the Gothic flank of the church of Santo Stefano to San Vidal and the Accademia Bridge.
- Campo San Vitale
Campo San Vitale — which Venetians more often call Campo San Vidal — is a small passing-through square in the sestiere (district) of San Marco, wedged between the vastness of Campo Santo Stefano and the head of the Accademia Bridge.
- The Church of San Vitale
Cross Ponte Vitturi, where Girolamo Miani was born in 1481.
- The Accademia Bridge
The Accademia Bridge is one of the four bridges over the Grand Canal and perhaps Venice’s most famous belvedere: from its summit the gaze runs on one side as far as the Bacino di San Marco and the mass of the Salute, on the other to the ’volta de Canal’.
- The Carità Complex and the Gallerie dell'Accademia
Between the Accademia Bridge and the bank of the Grand Canal stretches the Carita complex: church, convent and seat of the oldest of the six Scuole Grandi (the great lay confraternities of Venice).
- Rio Terra Antonio Foscarini
Rio Terà Antonio Foscarini is the tree-lined avenue linking the Accademia to the Zattere.
- Church of Sant'Agnese
On Rio Terrà Antonio Foscarini — a filled-in canal turned tree-lined avenue, once the ’rio terrà degli Alberetti’ — the church of Sant’Agnese is one of the oldest in Venice: perhaps founded between the 9th and 10th centuries by a Mellini family — or, according to others, by the Molin — it is documented from 1081, renewed after the fire of 1105 and consecrated in 1321 — and Stringa, in the early 17th century, admired its eleven decorated altars, before the benefactor Lodovico Bruzzoni beautified it further and a parish priest remade the atrium.
- Rio Terra dei Gesuati
You are walking on water, even if you cannot see it: the Rio Tera dei Gesuati is a filled-in canal — the last stretch of the straight rio de Sant’Agnese that ran from the Grand Canal down to the Giudecca canal, vaulted over in 1864.
- Fondamenta delle Zattere e Ponte della Calcina
The Fondamenta delle Zattere is Dorsoduro’s long, sunlit waterfront, running for over a kilometre along the Giudecca Canal, from Punta della Dogana to the Stazione Marittima.
- The Church of the Gesuati and the Visitazione
On the Zattere, facing the Giudecca Canal, two churches stand side by side, linked by a shared history: the small Santa Maria della Visitazione, Venice’s first Renaissance church, begun in 1494, and the grand Santa Maria del Rosario, known as the Gesuati, built between 1726 and 1736 by Giorgio Massari for the Dominicans who took over from the suppressed Poveri Gesuati.
- La Bocca di Leone della Sanità
The bocche di leone (lion’s mouths) appeared in Venice after 1310, when the Republic crushed the conspiracy of Bajamonte Tiepolo and decided to give itself eyes everywhere.
- Ponte Lungo
There where the Zattere meet the mouth of the rio di San Trovaso, the Ponte Lungo links the two halves of the sunniest promenade in Venice.
- The Church of San Trovaso and the Historic Squero
In a quiet, tree-lined campo (Venetian square) in Dorsoduro stands the church of Saints Gervasius and Protasius, which Venetians have always called San Trovaso: a dialect shortening that fused the two names into one. A church stood here as early as the 11th century.
- Ponte della Calcina
The Ponte de la Calcina crosses the rio de San Vio (a small canal) where the fondamenta (canalside walkway) meets the Zattere, halfway between the Gesuati and the Incurabili: a stone bridge with a brick structure and iron bands in diamond and circle patterns supported by little columns of Istrian stone.
- The former Ospizio degli Incurabili and the singing of the orphans
Along the Zattere, opposite Palladio’s Redentore, stretches the long white façade of the former Ospedale degli Incurabili: founded in 1522 on the initiative of two noblewomen, Maria Malipiero and Marina Grimani, who gathered the first suffering women into a house, and organised by Gaetano da Thiene and Girolamo Miani to assist syphilis patients — the ’mal francese’ that the age considered incurable — it later became one of the four great Venetian Ospedali, those in which charity turned into music.
- The Church and former Scuola of the Spirito Santo
Along the Zattere, with its façade turned towards the Giudecca Canal, the church of the Spirito Santo keeps an eventful history: here arose in 1483 the monastery of the Augustinian nuns, famous already in the 16th century for the scandals documented by Tassini, and here the church was rebuilt in 1506, when the fondamenta (canalside walkway) was laid out along the canal.
- Ponte dei Saloni
At the eastern end of the Zattere, where the long promenade along the Giudecca Canal approaches the Magazzini del Sale and Punta della Dogana, a small stone bridge over the rio de la Fornace preserves the name ’Saloni’ — old maps also called it the ponte de Cà Balà.
- The Magazzini del Sale and the Rio dei Catecumeni
Where the Zattere grow wider, just before Punta della Dogana, stretches one of the most imposing facades in Venice: the Magazzini del Sale, the ’Saloni’ — the nine colossal deposits where the Serenissima piled up the white gold, the salt from the salt pans of Chioggia and Cervia that fed the commerce and the food preservation of the whole city.
- Rio Terra dei Catecumeni
A few steps behind the Basilica della Salute, this rio terà (a filled-in canal, now a street) was laid out in 1818 over the rio dei Catecumeni.
- Ponte dell'Umiltà
The last bridge of the Zattere before the Punta della Dogana: it crosses the rio della Salute between the Fondamenta dei Saloni and the Fondamenta de la Dogana, where the Giudecca Canal opens in all its width.
- Punta della Dogana and the Dogana da Mar
At the tip of Dorsoduro, where the Grand Canal meets St Mark’s Basin, juts out the Punta della Dogana: for centuries Venice’s customs gate, the point where every ship was checked and taxed before entering the heart of the city.
- Campo della Salute
This is not a campo like the others: it is a piece of stage design built to be seen from the water.
- The Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute
On 22 October 1630 the Venetian Senate made a solemn vow: if the Virgin freed the city from the plague that in eighteen months had killed almost half of its inhabitants, Venice would erect in her honour the most beautiful church ever built.
- The Seminario Patriarcale and the Pinacoteca Manfrediniana
Beside the Basilica della Salute, where Dorsoduro looks onto the Grand Canal, stretches the white, severe façade of the Seminario Patriarcale: the palace that Baldassare Longhena built between 1669 and 1671 for the Somaschi fathers, on the site of the ancient monastery of the Trinità.
- The Church and Abbey of San Gregorio
On the last strip of Dorsoduro, close to Punta della Dogana, the San Gregorio complex is made of two halves: the Gothic brick church that gives onto the campo (a Venetian square) of the same name and, closer to the Grand Canal, what remains of the old Benedictine abbey, with its 14th-century portal and the little cloister of 1342.
- Ramo, Calle e Campiello Barbaro
Campiello Barbaro, a small square tucked between the Salute and the Guggenheim Collection, lies in the shade of the gardens of two celebrated palaces, Ca’ Dario and Palazzo Barbaro.
- The Barbaro Palaces
Just after the Accademia Bridge, on the right bank of the Grand Canal, lines up one of the most beautiful stage sets in Europe: the flamboyant Gothic of Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti and then the Barbaro Palaces, two blocks of buildings enclosing five centuries of history.
- Palazzo Dario and Campiello Barbaro
Between Palazzo Barbaro Wolkoff and the rio delle Torreselle (a small Venetian canal), Ca’ Dario is the most many-faceted jewel on the Grand Canal: a Renaissance façade studded with roundels and discs of polychrome marbles, porphyry and serpentine — nearly eighty medallions glittering like gems — and behind it, looking onto the quiet Campiello Barbaro (small square), a still-Gothic soul of three-lobed arches, loggias and inverted-cone chimneys.
- Calle San Cristoforo
From the Ponte San Cristoforo — a stone bridge banded with brick that joins the Campiello Barbaro (small square) to the calle (street), spanning the rio de le Toresele (a small canal) — this Dorsoduro street leads towards the Fondamenta Venier and the Grand Canal.
- Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Amid the line-up of palaces on the Grand Canal, between the Accademia and the Salute, one stands out unlike all the others: low, white, a single floor - Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the ’palazzo nonfinito’ (the unfinished palace).
- Campo San Vio
A campo with two sides on the water, unique of its kind: the Grand Canal to the north, the rio of San Vio to the west connecting it to the Giudecca Canal.
- Palazzo Barbarigo
Palazzo Barbarigo is the palazzo that, from the vaporetto (water bus) on the Grand Canal, never goes unnoticed: its façade is a glittering mantle of glass mosaics that catches the sun and gives it back to the water.
- Palazzo Loredan (now Cini)
At the corner between the Grand Canal and the rio (Venetian canal) di San Vio, Palazzo Loredan Cini is actually the union of two Renaissance buildings of the second half of the 16th century: you can still read it in the house numbers, because the two bodies answer to 732 and 864, and in the little private bridge linking the water portal to the campo.
- Piscina del Forner
Between Campo San Vio, a campo (square), and the Campo della Carità runs one of the quietest lanes in Dorsoduro: the Piscina del Forner.