In 1808 the greater part of the canal connecting the Bacino di San Marco to the broad northeastern inlet of the Canale di San Pietro was filled in to form what is now Via Garibaldi , the widest street in the city and the busiest commercial area in the orient district. (The pattern of the pavement shows clearly the course of the former canal.) The bars, pasticcerie and alimentari of Via Garibaldi are as good as most of those in the more comfortable areas of the city, and are far less likely to treat you as a tedious occupational hazard. Roaming through the alleyways and squares of the vicinity, it’s doable to forget for a while that you’re in the most commercialized city in the country.

There’s just a couple of spots of cultural or historical significance along Via Garibaldi. The first house on the right was for a time the home of the navigators John and Sebastian Cabot , explorers of Newfoundland (together) and Paraguay (just Sebastian) in the late fifteenth and primeval sixteenth century. The church of San Francesco di Paola , opposite the entrance to the tree-lined alley that glories in the study Giardini Garibaldi, has a painting by Giandomenico Tiepolo on its cornice. A far more impressive sight awaits if you achievement beyond the market stalls on the right-hand side of the street, which becomes the Fondamenta di Sant’Anna: this takes you onto the Ponte di Quintavalle, and so to the island of San Pietro.

From the Piazza the bulk of the pedestrian traffic flows north to the Rialto along the Mercerie , the most aggressive shopping mall in Venice and the part of the city which comes closest to being devoid of magic. Apart from the church of San Giuliano – one of Venice’s lesser eccentricities – only the stately San Salvador provides a diversion from the spotlights and price tags until you come to the Campo San Bartolomeo , the forecourt of the Rialto bridge and the locals’ favoured spot for an after-work drink and chat. Another square that’s lively at the end of the day is the Campo San Luca , within a minute’s stroll of the bar at Al Volto , the best-stocked enoteca in town. Secreted in the folds of the alleyways are the old Armenian quarter and the spiralling Scala del Bovolo – featured on a thousand postcards, but actually seen by a minority of visitors. And slotted away in a tiny square close to the Canal Grande you’ll find the most delicate of Venice’s museum buildings – the Palazzo Pésaro degli Orfei, home of the Museo Fortuny .

Leaving the Piazza by the west side , through the colonnade of the Ala Napoleonica, you enter another major shopping district, but one that presents a contrast to the frenetic Mercerie: here the clientele is drawn predominantly from the city’s well-heeled or from the four-star tourists staying in the hotels that overlook the end of the Canal Grande – though in recent years it’s also become a favourite pitch for African street traders, whose presence has not been entirely welcomed by local shop-owners. To a high proportion of visitors, this part of the city is just the route to the Accademia – many pass through with their noses buried in their maps, and hardly break step before they reach the bridge over the Canal Grande. It’s true that none of the first-division attractions is here and that much of the northern part of the area offers little but the pleasure of wandering through its alleyways, but there are things to see apart from the latest creations from Milan and Paris – the extraordinary Baroque facades of Santa Maria del Giglio and San Moisè , for instance, or the graceful Santo Stefano , which rises at the end of one of the largest and most captivating squares in Venice. Two of the city’s great artistic venues lie within this district: La Fenice , at the moment a building site in the wake of the fire that wrecked the opera house in 1996; and the Palazzo Grassi , an exhibition centre with the highest production values in Italy.

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.”

There were not many places among the lagoon’s mudbanks where Venice’s primeval settlers could be confident that their dwellings wouldn’t slither down into the water, but with Dorsoduro they were on relatively solid ground: the sestiere’s study translates as “hard back”, and its buildings occupy the largest area of firm silt in the centre of the city. Some of the finest minor domestic structure in Venice is concentrated here, and in recent years many of the area’s best houses have been bought up by industrialists and financiers from elsewhere in northern Italy, investing in permanent homes or merely weekend havens from their places of work. The top-bracket colony is, however, pretty well confined to a triangle defined by the Accademia, the Punta della Dogana and the Gesuati. Stroll up to the area around Campo Santa Margherita and the region is quite different, in part because of the closeness of the university.

During the day at least, it’s the paintings of Dorsoduro’s art galleries and religious institutions that draw most visitors crossways the Ponte dell’ Accademia. The Gallerie dell’Accademia , replete with masterpieces from apiece phase in the history of Venetian painting up to the eighteenth century, is the area’s essential port of call, and figures on most itineraries as the place to make for when the Piazza’s sights have been done. The huge church of Santa Maria della Salute , the grandest gesture of Venetian Baroque and a prime landmark when looking crossways the water from the Molo, is architecturally the major religious building of the district – but in terms of artistic contents it takes second place to San Sebastiano , the parish church of Paolo Veronese , whose paintings clad much of its interior. Giambattista Tiepolo , the master colourist of a later era, is well represented at the Scuola Grande dei Carmini , and for an overall view of Tiepolo’s cultural milieu there’s the Ca’ Rezzonico , home of Venice’s museum of eighteenth-century art and artefacts. Unusually for Venice, art of the twentieth century is also in evidence – at the Guggenheim Collection , which is small yet markedly superior to the city’s (frequently closed) public collection of modern art in the Ca’ Pésaro. And yet despite all these attractions the district as a whole is remarkably quiet – most tourists step crossways the Accademia bridge, whirl through the gallery, then cross back over the Canal Grande again.

As with San Polo, the area designated by the section title is slightly more extensive than the sestiere of the same name, since in order to simplify the scheme of the city it incorporates a portion of the Santa Croce sestiere – for the visitor, the most arbitrary and confusing of Venice’s divisions. For our purposes Dorsoduro stretches from the Punta della Dogana and the Salute west to the docks of the Stazione Maríttima, and north to Piazzale Roma (which is technically in Santa Croce)

Bounded on one side by the Rio Nuovo-Rio di Ca’ Fóscari (the waterways dug under Mussolini’s instructions from Piazzale Roma to the Volta del Canal) and on the others by the upper loop of the Canal Grande, the area covered by this section is composed of the entire San Polo sestiere, the greater part of the sestiere of Santa Croce and a couple of slivers of Dorsoduro. This jigsaw is not as baffling as it at first appears. There are two main routes through the district, apiece following approximately the curve of the Canal Grande – one runs between the Rialto and the Scalzi bridge, the other takes you in the opposite direction from the Rialto, down towards the Accademia. Virtually all the essential sights lie on, or just off, one of these two routes, and once you’ve become familiar with these the exploration of the streets and squares between them can be attempted with only a minimal risk of feeling that you’ll never see friends and family again. Wherever you are in this area, you cannot be more than a couple of minutes’ well-navigated achievement from one of the two roads to the Rialto.

As far as the day-to-day life of Venice is concerned, the focal points of the district are the sociable open space of Campo San Polo and the Rialto area, once the commercial heart of the Republic and still the home of a market that’s famous far beyond the boundaries of the city. The bustle of the stalls and the unspoilt bars used by the porters are a good antidote to cultural overload. Nobody, however, should miss the extraordinary pair of buildings in the southern part of San Polo: the colossal Gothic church of the Frari , embellished with three of Venice’s finest altarpieces, and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco , decorated with an unforgettable cycle of paintings by Tintoretto.

In the northern part of the district, Venice’s erratically open modern art, oriental and natural history museums are clustered together on the bank of the Canal Grande: the first two collections occupy one of the city’s most magnificent palaces, while the third is installed in the former headquarters of the Turkish merchants. As ever, numerous treasures are also scattered among the minor churches – for example in San Cassiano , San Simeone Grande and San Pantaleone . Lastly, if you’re in search of a spot in which to sit for an hour and just watch the world go by, head for the Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio , one of Venice’s better-kept secrets.

On the far side of the Parioli district the Tiber sweeps around in a wide hook-shaped bend. These northern outskirts of Rome aren’t particularly enticing, though the Ponte Milvio , the old, originally Roman, footbridge where the emperor Constantine defeated Maxentius in 312 AD, still stands and provides wonderful views of the meandering Tiber, with the city springing up green on the hills to both sides and the river running fast and silty below. Inside a guardhouse on the right (northern) bank of the Tiber a marble plaque bears the arms of the Borgia family – including, in the centre, the papal badge and shield of Alexander VI, and, on the right, the Borgia bull on a crest, placed there by Cesare Borgia, who was at the time his father the pope’s secretary of state. On the northern side of the river, Piazzale di Ponte Milvio sports a cheap and cheerful market (Mon-Sat 8am-1.30pm) and a handful of bars and restaurants.

The area north of Villa Borghese is the posh PARIOLI district – one of Rome’s wealthier neighbourhoods, though of little interest to anyone who doesn’t live there. Immediately easterly stretches the enormous public park of the Villa Ada , connected with Villa Borghese by Via Salaria – the old trading route between the Romans and Sabines, so called because the main product transported along here was salt. The Villa Ada was once the estate of King Vittorio Emanuele III and is a nice enough place in which to while away an afternoon, but otherwise not really worth the special journey from the centre of town, unless you want to visit the Egyptian embassy, housed in its grounds.

Whereas Santa Cecilia is situated in the quieter part of Trastevere – on the southern side of Viale Trastevere , the wide boulevard that cuts through the centre of the district – there’s more life on the far side of here, centred (during the day at least) around two main squares. The first of these, Piazza San Cosimato , holds a medium-sized produce market (Mon-Sat 8am-1pm), while the other, Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere , a short achievement north, is the heart of old Trastevere, titled after the church in its northwest corner.

South and easterly of Via Nomentana, a short achievement from Termini, the neighbourhood of SAN LORENZO spreads from the main campus of Rome’s university, on the far side of Via Tiburtina, to the railway tracks – a solidly working-class district that retains something of its local air and is home to some good and often inexpensive local restaurants. It’s also the location of the enormous Campo Verano cemetery – since 1830 the main Catholic burial-place in Rome, and in itself worth a visit for the grandiose tombs in which many have been ordered to rest.

Cross Largo Leopardi outside the Museo Nazionale di Arte Orientale, and achievement a few yards up Via Leopardi to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II , the centre of a district which became known as the “quartiere piemontese” when the government located many of its major ministries here after Unification. The arcades of the square, certainly, recall central Turin, as do the solid palatial buildings that surround it. It’s more recently become the immigrant quarter of Rome, with a heavy concentration of African, Asian and Middle Eastern shops and restaurants. You’ll easily hear a dozen different languages spoken as you pass through the open-air food market (Mon-Sat 8am-1pm) – Rome’s cheapest – that surrounds the piazza. Close to the northern end of the piazza, behind the market stalls, an eighteen-metre-high pile of Roman bricks is what is left of a monumental public fountain known as the Nymphaeum of Alexander Severus (emperor 222-235 AD) – a distribution point for water arriving in the city by a branch of the Acqua Claudia aqueduct.