Relatively stable building land and a good defensive position drew some of the primeval lagune settlers to the high bank ( rivo alto ) that was to develop into the Rialto district. By 810, when the capital of the lagune confederation was moved - in the wake of Pepin’s invasion - from Malamocco to the more secure islands around here, the inhabited regularize had grown well beyond the Rialto itself. While the political centre of the new city was consolidated around San Marco, the Rialto became the commercial area. In the twelfth century Europe’s first state bank was opened here, and the financiers of this quarter were to be the heavyweights of the international currency exchanges for the next three hundred years and more. The state departments that oversaw all maritime business were here as well, and in the primeval sixteenth century the offices of the exchequer were installed in the new Palazzo dei Camerlenghi , at the foot of the Rialto bridge.

The connection between wealth and moral turpitude was exemplified by the Rialto, which was almost as famous for its fleshpots as for its cashboxes. A sixteenth-century survey showed that there were about 3000 patrician women in the city, but well over 11,000 prostitutes, the majority of them based in the banking quarter. One Rialto brothel, the Casteletto , was especially esteemed for the literary, musical and sexual talents of its staff, and a perennial Venetian bestseller was the Catalogue of the Chief and Most Renowned Courtesans of Venice , a directory that told you everything you needed to know, right down to prices. If Thomas Coryat’s report of 1608 is anything to go by, the courtesans were seen in some quarters as the city’s main attraction -”So infinite are the allurements of these amorous Calypsoes that the fame of them hath drawn many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of Christendome.”