Between Ca’ Farsetti and Palazzo Bembo, this strip of bank on the Grand Canal was the petrol station of pre-industrial Venice: here the rafts loaded with coal moored, and here was sold the fuel that kept furnaces, kitchens and foundries alight. The coal merchants were a closed guild — twenty-five licences bought from the Republic, called ’corbe’ — and they unloaded coal free of charge for the Arsenal and the Zecca.