 |
|||
 |
|||
|
|||
The Layout of Venice
Making sense of the tangle of canals, calle, campi that make up the sestieri (neighborhoods) of Venice's city layout
Streetwise VeniceRickSteves Italy maps
Insight pocket map
Rough Guide map
Globetrotter Venice
» More Venice maps
ReidsItaly.com Venice Map
» View ENLARGED MAP with all listings
TOURS FROM OUR TRUSTED PARTNERS that include Venice
Intrepid Travel 2011 Italy trips
• Best of Italy
• Italy Uncovered
• Italy Experience
• Classic Italy
• Italy Family Adventure
• Highlights of Italy
• Umbrian Discovery
Not just Italy...
Paris to Venice
Venice to Istanbul
G Adventures 2011 Italy trips
• Ultimate Italy
• Italy Culture and History Explored (9 days)
• Venice to Rome Adventure
• Italy Family Adventure
iExplore Italy trips 2011
• Italy Experience (9 days)
• Italy in Style (9 days)
» THE VENICE BOOKSHELF
Venice's overall plan is simple enough, as you can see in this map from a 1913 Baedeker's guidebook, but the devil lies in the details...There's no two ways about it: Venice has one of the most confusing, frustrating, and unfathomable layouts of any city on Earth.
On the surface, it looks simple enough: a few big islands wrapped around the sweeping backward-S curve of the breathtaking, palace-lined Canale Grande (Grand Canal), with lots of smaller canals—nearly 180 of them—worming their way through those islands across a tangle of alleys.
The reality is much more complicated.
Street names can change every block—not that it matters, since official addresses don't include the street name, just the neighborhood name. Even that won't help much, since buildings are numbered not based on location but on the order in which the buildings were built (so no.1 might be next to no. 2074).
Oh, and street names can repeat from neighborhood to neighborhood—so you may find "Calle della Madonna" and think you're home free, only it's the Calle della Madonna in San Marco and what you wanted was the Calle della Madonna in S. Polo, half-way across town.
To help, this site will present addresses in a far more logical manner than the official one: including both the number and the street name, followed by the sestiere (neighborhood) designation in parentheses. We'll also try to include cross-streets, a nearby campo (square), and other details to help you pinpoint an address.
What's more, we've teamed with Google maps to plot the location of every hotel, restaurant, sight, and major landmark detailed in this online guide. Most pages on this site will include, near the top of the the sidebar on the right, a tiny inset map showing the location of the address being mentioned. Click on the "View Larger Map" to be taken to the ReidsItaly.com Google map version of this Venice guide, peppered with little icons denoting sights (blue flags), hotels (red beds), and dining spots (yellow knife-and-fork images), as well as tourist info offices, train stations, major vaporetto stops, and other useful info.
The best advice I can give is this: Buy the best map you can find, take a deep breath, and prepare to get lost repeatedly.
Getting Used to Venice's (Lack of A) Street Plan
A Street by Any Other Word
Venice doesn't use the same labels for its streets and squares as the rest of Italy. A canale or rio is a canal, of which Venice has nearly 180.
Streets might variously be called calle, ruga, ramo, or salizada. Other kinds of street: rio terrà—a street made from a filled-in canal—and fondamenta or riva, both of which denote a sidewalk along the edge of a canal (usually they take the name of the canal itself, though not always). There are also sottoportico and sottoportego, public passageways under buildings.
A campo, campiello, or corte is a square (Piazza San Marco, Piazzetta San Marco, and Piazzale Roma being the only exceptions); a piscina is a square that, like a rio terrà, was once a canal and has since been filled in.
The Venetian map is a big tangled bowl of spaghetti. Venice has two overlapping infrastructures, one of narrow streets and the other of canals. These networks sometimes work together, and sometimes interfere with each other.
The impossibly twisty, narrow alleyways of the city often end abruptly in a blank wall, or run you in circles, or suddenly turn into steps that disappear into a canal. Constant backtracking is inevitable.
Occasionally, the alleyways will get you from one place to another, or spill unexpectedly into a large campo (square), or lead over one of the thousands of tiny arched marble bridges straddling the canals—the most magnificent is the Rialto bridge over the Grand Canal—and dump you into another crazy tangle of streets on the other side.
Little signs (usually yellow, sometimes white) are scattered along the main routes with arrows to help lead you from one major landmark to another—San Marco, Rialto (the main bridge), Ferrovia (train station), the Accademia museum—and the sharp-eyed can follow these along the convoluted path all the way from, say, the train station to Piazza San Marco (in about 45 minutes).
Plan on any journey taking three times as long as you imagine, and don't fret about being late. Setting out from your hotel door in Venice is always an adventure—as long as you treat it as such, you'll have fun getting lost.
The Sestieri (Neighborhoods) of Venice
The sestieri (neighborhoods) of Venice. Administratively, Giudecca—that purple one all by itself at the bottom—is part of Dorsoduro, but in practice its a neighborhood unto itself. That black-on-white stem coming in from the upper left is Ponte della Libertà, the only physical link—road and rail—with the mainland.The Venice we all know and dream about lies 2.5 miles from dry land, connected to the mainland sister city of Venezia-Mestre (never be fooled into staying in this bland, industrial city a ten-minute train ride from the real Venice; if the hotel says its in Mestre, just say "no") by the Ponte della Libertà, which leads to Piazzale Roma—the only bit of Venice accessible by car.
Venice's chaotic map is divided into six main neighborhoods called sestieri, or "sixths"—which doesn't include the some 168 outlying islands (but we'll only worry about three or four of those; see below).
San Marco
Bet you didn't know you spoke Venetian
Like many regional dialects in Italy, Venetian is practically a language unto itself, virtually incomprehensible to anyone outside of Venice—including other Italians. However, there is a handful of Venetian dialect that has made its way into everyday Italian and even crossed over into English. Since several of these terms are derived from Venetian neighborhoods or landmarks, I'll review here some of the more familiar words in the dialect you didn't know you knew.
Arsenal - Weapons factory and storehouse; originally from the Arabic and applied to the massive Renaissance shipyard and military base at the far end of the Castello neighborhood—still in use, both by the Navy and by the famous Venice Biennale art show.
Ciao - The informal and ubiquitous way to say both "howdy" and "see-ya" in Italy (and Hollywood) actually derives from the rather more formal medieval greeting of s-ciao su, "I am your slave/servant."
Ghetto - Isolated neighborhood where minorities live. In the early 1500s, Venice forced its Jewish residents to move into a sector of the city where they lived in semi–self-governed isolation, their movements greatly restricted, cut off from many opportunities in the rest of Venice. Since there was a foundry in the area, the neighborhood eventually began being referred to using the Venetian dialect word for foundry: "ghetto." In an age of intolerance, other closed-minded cities thought this was a capital idea and the practice spread rapidly throughout Europe.
Gondola - No one knows whence the word derived—or why it's also applied to enclosed ski lift capsules—but everyone is familiar with these typical Venetian rowboats: long, slightly crooked, funereal black, poled by stripe-shirted oarsmen, and filled with Japanese tourists.
Lagoon - Shallow body or salty water separated from the sea by barrier islands or a reef; from the Latin lacuna, "empty space"
Lido - Venice's seven-mile long sandbar barrier island with its Grande Dame resort hotels has lent its name to beaches—and cruise ship decks—around the world.
Quarantine - Ships arriving in the medieval Venetian port of Ragusa (today's Dubrovnik, Croatia) were forced to spend a quarantena—forty day period—in isolation to be sure they didn't carry plague.
Regatta - Boat race.The center of Venice is the San Marco district, much of which is very touristy today. Here you'll find the gorgeous, pigeon-filed and café-lined Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Square), with its Cathedral of St. Mark and Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace). The extension of Piazza San Marco that runs along the Palazzo Ducale to the Grand Canal is called Piazzetta San Marco. The San Marco district is home to hundreds of souvenir shops, the priciest hotels, the world-renowned (and recently burned down, but now rebuilt) La Fenice opera house, and many (generally expensive) restaurants.
Castello
East of San Marco lies the large Castello neighborhood, which features a classy stretch of lagoon-front property called Riva degli Schiavoni (it starts where Piazzetta San Marco hits the Grand Canal's mouth in the Bacino San Marco basin), home to a plethora of upscale hotels like the famous Hotel Danieli. Castello is focused upon the Arsenale, the old ship-building sector of the city—still a navy yard, and hence mostly closed to the public (except every other year during the internationally renowned art show known as the Venice Biennale).
Cannaregio
Unless you arrive by plane, chances are that the first neighborhood you'll see—whether taking the train or driving in—is the Cannaregio, on the very north end of the city above the top curve of the Grand Canal's backward "S". Cannaregio also has the dubious honor of incorporating Europe's first Jewish Ghetto. There is, as usual, cheap lodging right around the train station, but it's mainly a residential neighborhood and unless you're coming up here to see specific sights, you probably won't hang around too long.
San Polo
S. Polo (frequently, though incorrectly, written as "San Paolo"—which is understandable, as that's the standard Italian spelling) fills up much of the area on the west side of the Grand Canal, a commercial district with lots of moderately priced hotels, shops, and trattorie, as well as some big ol' churches and their outbuildings that beckon the sightseer, like the exquisite Scuola Grande di San Rocco.
Santa Croce
To the north of S. Polo, lying along the underside of the top curve in that backwards "S," is the sestiere of Santa Croce, tiniest of the neighborhoods, half industrial and half filled with sleepy old palazzi along the Grand Canal, all very untouristed.
Dorsoduro
Across the Grand Canal from San Marco is the most southerly of districts, the Dorsoduro. It's the trendiest quarter in a city that, despite its reputation for a Carnival to rival Rio's, doesn't seem to have heard of nightlife. The area is sparsely populated and has a smattering of bars and cafes, some good trattorie and cheap hotels, and Venice's two great art museums, the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim.
Unconnected to the Dorsoduro but technically a part of it and visible from downtown Venice is the Giudecca, a long curving island paralleling Dorsoduro to the south and accessible only by boat. It's a tranquil working-class place, mostly a residential neighborhood but also home to the official youth hostel (don't bother; the Foresteria Valdese is far superior and more central) and a handful of hotels (including the fabled Cipriani, one of Europe's finest).
Outlying Islands
A map of the major outlying islands in the northern Venetian lagoon.The seven-mile-long sliver of faded-glory beach resort known as Lido di Venezia is the city's sandy beach, a popular summer destination for its concentration of seasonal hotels (and the locale for the famous short story A Death in Venice). It separates the lagoon from the sea and is accessible by car.
The name of any given street or campo can be used only once within a Venetian neighborhood—but there's no rule against the next sestiere over using the same label. As a result, the most popular names (like Calle della Madonna) pop up three or four times on the map, but refer to streets miles apart from one another. This is why it's vitally important to ascertain the sestiere along with any address. Oh, and by the way: The street-numbering system in Venice is completely and totally without any logic whatsoever.
In the lagoon north of central Venice lie Murano, Burano, and Torcello, easily accessible by public transport vaporetto. This is one of my favorite ways to spend a day in Venice, so I've laid out all the details on how to spend a day in the outlying islands on a separate page. Here's a short-take on each:
Since the 13th century, Murano has exported its glass products worldwide; it's an interesting day trip for those with the time, but you can do just as well in "downtown" Venice's myriad glass stores. 
Colorful fishing village–style Burano was and still is equally famous for its lace, an art now practiced by so few island women its prices are generally unaffordable.
Torcello is the most remote and least populated. The 40-minute boat ride is worthwhile for history and art buffs who'll be awestruck by the Byzantine mosaics of the cathedral (some of Europe's finest outside Ravenna's) whose foundation dates to the 7th century, making this the oldest Venetian monument in existence.
Along the way, you pass the Isola di San Michele, Venice's cemetery island where such celebrities as Stravinsky and Diaghilev are buried.
Related pages
ShareThis
Search ReidsItaly.com
This material was last updated February 2011. All information was accurate at the time.
about | contact | faq
» THE REIDSITALY.COM DIFFERENCE «
Copyright © 2008–2011 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
