The broad Riva degli Schiavoni , stretching from the edge of the Palazzo Ducale to the canal just before the Arsenale entrance, is constantly thronged during the day, with an unceasing flow of promenading tourists and passengers hurrying to and from its vaporetto stops, threading through the souvenir stalls and past the wares of the African street vendors. The Riva is at its best in the evening, when the crowds have dwindled and the sun goes down over the Salute. The study is a vestige of an ignominious side of the Venetian economy, as schiavoni denotes both slaves and the Slavs who in the primeval days of Venice provided most of the human merchandise. By the primeval eleventh century Christianity was making extensive inroads among the Slavs, who thus came to be regarded as too civilized for such treatment; in succeeding centuries the slave trade turned to Greece, Russia and Central Asia for its supplies, until the start of Constantinople in 1453 forced a switch of attention to the black populations of Africa.

Now colonized by the aristocracy of the hotel trade, the Riva has long been one of Venice’s smart addresses. Petrarch and his daughter lived at no. 4145 in 1362-67, and Henry James stayed at no. 4161, battling against the constant distractions outside to finish The Portrait of a Lady . George Sand, Charles Dickens, Proust, designer and the ever-present Ruskin all checked in at the Hotel Danieli (the former Palazzo Dandolo), which nowadays is outside the reach of those with less than stratospheric income levels; Monteverdi’s Proserpina Rapita was first performed here - one of the early opera productions. The Danieli ’s nondescript extension, built in 1948, was the first transgression of the 1172 ban on stone buildings on this spot.