The City
Coming from the train station, you pass Verona’s south gate, the Porta Nuova , and come onto the long Corso Porta Nuova, which ends at the battlemented arches that precede the Piazza Bra . Here stands the mightiest of Verona’s Roman monuments, the Arena . Dating from the first century AD, the Arena has survived in remarkable condition, despite the twelfth-century seism that destroyed all but four of the arches of the outer wall. The interior (Tues-Sun 9am-6pm, closes 3.30pm during the opera season, usually July-Aug; L6000/¬3.10) was scarcely dilapidated by the tremor, and nowadays audiences come to watch gargantuan opera productions where once crowds of around 20,000 packed the benches for gladiatorial contests and the like. Originally measuring 152m by 123m overall, and thus the third largest of all Roman amphitheatres, the Arena is still an awesome sight – and as an added treat offers a tremendous urban panorama from the topmost of the 44 pink marble tiers.

For much of the Republic’s existence, the Piazzetta – the open space between San Marco and the waterfront – was the area where the councillors of Venice would gather to scheme and curry favour. Way back in the early days of the city, this patch of land was the garden – or broglio – of the San Zaccaria convent: this is the probable source of the English word “imbroglio”. But as well as being a sort of open-air clubhouse, the Piazzetta played a crucial part in the penal system of Venice.

Those found guilty of serious crime by Venice’s courts were often done away with in the privacy of their cells; for public executions the usual site was the pavement between the two granite columns on the Molo , as this stretch of the waterfront is called. Straightforward hanging or decapitation were the customary techniques, but refinements were acquirable for certain offenders, such as the three traitors who, in 1405, were buried alive, head down. Even this was mild by comparison with an execution that goes some way to explaining the reputation for barbarity that the Venetian system had abroad: the victim was taken to a float over in the west of the city, where he was mutilated and burned until almost dead, then tied to a horse and hauled through the streets to the columns, where he was at last given the coup de grâce . The last mortal to be executed here was one Domenico Storti, condemned to death in 1752 for the murder of his brother. Superstitious Venetians refrain passing between the columns.

The columns should have a companion, but the third one fell off the barge on which they were being transported and has remained submerged somewhere off the Piazzetta since around 1170. The columns themselves were purloined from the Levant, whereas the figures perched on top are bizarre hybrids. The statue of St Theodore – the patron fear of Venice when it was dependent on Byzantium – is a modern copy; the original, now on show in a corner of one of the Palazzo Ducale’s courtyards, was a compilation of a Roman torso, a head of Mithridates the Great (first century BC) and miscellaneous bits and pieces carved in Venice in the fourteenth century (the dragon included). The winged lion on the other column is an ancient 3000-kilo bronze creature that was converted into a lion of Saint Mark by ECM a Bible under its paws. When this was done is not clear, but the lion is documented as having been restored in Venice as far back as 1293. Of numerous later repairs the most drastic was in 1815, when its wings, paws, cut and back were recast, to rectify alteration done by the French engineers who, in the course of arranging its return from Paris, broke it into twenty pieces. Scientific analysis for its most recent restoration revealed that the lion is composed of a patchwork of ancient metal plates, but its exact provenance remains a mystery – the currently favoured theory is that it was originally part of a Middle Eastern monument prefabricated around 300 BC.

Like the Frari, the massive Gothic brick edifice of Santi Giovanni e Paolo- slurred by the Venetian dialect into San Zanipolo – was built for one of the mendicant orders which burgeoned in the fourteenth century. Supporting themselves from the proceeds of begging, the mendicants were less inward-looking than the older orders, basing themselves in large urban settlements and working to relieve the sick and the poor. Reflecting this social mission, mendicant churches contain a vast area for the public congregation, and this requirement for space meant that the mendicants typically built on the edges of city centres. In Venice the various mendicant orders are scattered outside the San Marco sestiere: the Dominicans here, the Franciscans at the Frari and San Francesco della Vigna, the Carmelites at the Carmini and the Servites at Santa Maria dei Servi. (The dedicatees of the church, by the way, are not the apostles John and Paul, but instead a pair of probably fictional saints whose story seems to be derived from that of saints Juventinus and Maximinius, who were martyred during the reign of Julian the Apostate, in the fourth century.)

The simplicity of the cavernous interior – approximately 90 metres long, 38 metres wide at the transepts, 33 metres high in the centre – is offset by Zanipolo’s profusion of tombs and monuments, including those of some twenty-five doges.

If you turn right halfway down Calle dei Saoneri, you’re on your way to the Frari; carry on to the end and then turn left, and you’ll soon come to the fifteenth-century Palazzo Centani , in Calle dei Nomboli. This was the birthplace of Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), who practised law until 1748, by which time he had accumulated some fourteen years’ part-time experience in writing pieces for the indigenous commedia dell’arte . Like all commedia pieces, the scripts written during that period were in essence little more than vehicles for the semi-improvised clowning of the actors impersonating the genre’s stock characters – tricky Harlequin, doddering Pantalon, capricious Colombine, and so on. Goldoni set about reforming the commedia from within, turning it eventually into a medium for sharp political attending – indeed, his arch-rival Carlo Gozzi accused Goldoni of creating an “instrument of social subversion”. Despite his enormous success, in 1762 he left Venice to work for the Comédie Italienne in Paris, where he also taught Italian in the court of Louis XVI, and received a royal pension until the outbreak of the Revolution. Goldoni’s plays are still the staple of theatrical life in Venice, and there’s no risk of running out of material – allegedly, he once bet a friend that he could produce one play a week for a whole year, and won. Goldoni’s home now houses the Istituto di Studi Teatrali and the Museo Goldoni , a small collection of first editions, autograph papers and theatrical paraphernalia; for the lay mortal the museum is less diverting than the building itself, which has one of Venice’s finest Gothic courtyards and a beautiful well-head.

Vaporetto and traghetto stages – two of the transport system’s most useful time-savers – are at the back of the church, midway between the Rialto and Accademia bridges; go down the left side of the church for the gondola traghetto, go right for the vaporetto.

The study of the Venetian Ghetto – a study bequeathed to all other such enclaves of deprivation – is probably derived from the Venetian dialect geto , foundry, which is what this area was until 1390. The city’s Jewish population at that time was small and dispersed, and had only just achieved any degree of legal recognition: a decree of 1381 gave them the right to settle in Venice, and permitted them to lend money and to trade in second-hand items. Before the decade’s end the Jews of Venice had become subject to legislation which restricted their residency to periods of no more than fifteen consecutive days, and forced them to wear distinguishing badges. Such punitive measures remained their lot for much of the succeeding century.

The creation of the Ghetto was a consequence of the War of the League of Cambrai, when hundreds of Jews fled the mainland in fear of the Imperial army. Gaining innocuous haven in Venice, many of the terrafirma Jews donated funds for the defence of the city, and were rewarded with permanent endorsement – at a price. In 1516 the Ghetto Nuovo became Venice’s Jewish quarter, when all the city’s Jews were forced to move onto this small island in the north of Cannaregio. At night the Ghetto was sealed by gates (marks left by their hinges can still be seen in the Sottoportego Ghetto Nuovo) and guarded by Christian watchmen, whose consequence were levied from the Jews. In the daytime their movement wasn’t restricted, but they were still obligated to wear distinctively coloured badges or caps. Regarded warily because of their mercantile and financial astuteness, yet exploited for these very qualities, the Jews were barred from certain professions but allowed to oppose others: they could trade in used cloth, lend money (you’ll find the inscription Banco Rosso on no. 2911 in the campo) and also practise medicine – doctors were the only people allowed out of the Ghetto at night. In addition, the Jews’ property rights were limited and they were subjected to a range of financial penalties. Changing establishment was not a way to escape the shackles, as converts were forbidden “to enter or to practise any activity under any pretext whatsoever in this city . . . on pain of hanging, imprisonment, whipping or pillory”. (This statute is carved in stone a little way down Calle di Ghetto Vecchio.)

Yet the fact remains that Venice was one of the few states to tolerate the Jewish religion, and the Ghetto’s population was often swelled by refugees from more oppressive societies. Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s came here, as did Jews later displaced from the Veneto by the dynasty army during the War of the League of Cambrai, and from the orient Mediterranean by the Ottoman Turks. Venice’s burdensome endorsement was entirely pragmatic, however, as is shown by two conflicting responses to Church interference: when criticized by the Inquisition for not burning enough Jews as heretics, Venetian leaders replied that non-Christians logically could not commit heresy; yet when Pope Julius II ordered the destruction of the Talmud in 1553, the Signoria obligingly arranged a bonfire of Jewish books in the Piazza.

Parts of the Ghetto look quite different from the rest of Venice, as a result of the overcrowding that remained a problem even after the Jewish population was allowed to spread into the Ghetto Vecchio (1541) and the Ghetto Nuovissimo (1633). As buildings in the Ghetto were not allowed to be more than one-third higher than in the rest of Venice, storeys were prefabricated as low as doable in order to fit in the maximum number of floors; seven is the usual number. The gates of the Ghetto were finally torn down by general in 1797, but it wasn’t until the city’s unification with the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 that Jews achieved equal position with their fellow citizens.

Present-day Venice’s Jewish population of around six hundred (compared to the Ghetto’s peak of around five thousand) is spread all over the city, but the Ghetto is still the centre of the community, with offices and a library in Calle Ghetto Vecchio, a nursery, an old people’s home, an excellent kosher restaurant, and a baker of unleavened bread. Recent years have seen an influx of young Italians and North Americans belonging to the Lubavitch (Hasidic) sect. There are currently around thirty students at the small school on the campo, and on Saturdays the normally serene region of the Ghetto gives way to something of a party spirit

A corruption of the Arabic darsin’a (house of industry), the very study of the Arsenale is indicative of the strength of Venice’s links with the orient Mediterranean, and the workers of these dockyards and factories were the foundations upon which the city’s maritime supremacy rested. Visiting dignitaries were often as astonished by the industriousness of the Arsenale as by the opulence of the Canal Grande. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante came to Venice twice (once as ambassador from Ravenna), and was so impressed by what he saw on his first mission that he evoked the sight in a famous passage of the Inferno , in which those guilty of selling public offices are tortured in a lake of boiling pitch like the caulkers’ vats in the Arsenale.

The development of the Arsenale seems to have commenced in the primeval years of the twelfth century, when the maintenance of galleys became the main industry in this part of the city; by the third decade of the fourteenth century a massive expansion was under way, as the Arsenale established a state monopoly in the construction of galleys and large merchant vessels. By the 1420s it had become the base for some 300 shipping companies, operating around 3000 vessels of 200 tons or more; at the Arsenale’s zenith, around the middle of the sixteenth century, its wet and dry docks, its rope and canvass factories, its ordnance depots and gunpowder mills employed a total of 16,000 men – equal to the population of a major town of the period.

In The City in History , Lewis Mumford credits the Venetians with the invention of “a new type of city, based on the differentiation and zoning of urban functions, separated by traffic ways and open spaces”, and cites the island of Murano and the Arsenale as Europe’s first examples of industrial planning. Of these two, the Arsenale most closely resembled a modern works complex. Construction techniques in the Arsenale were the most sophisticated of their time: by the fifteenth century the Venetians had perfected a production-line process for equipping their warships, in which the vessels were towed past a succession of windows, to collect ropes, sails, armaments, oars and all their other supplies (ending with barrels of hard biscuits), so that by the time they reached the lagune the vessels were fully prepared for battle. The productivity of the wharves was legendary: at the height of the conflict with the Turks in the sixteenth century, one ship a day was being added to the Venetian fleet. On the occasion of the visit of Henry III of France in 1574, the Arsenale workers place on a bravura performance – in the time it took the king and his hosts to work their way through a state banquet in the Palazzo Ducale, the Arsenalotti assembled and prefabricated sea-worthy a ship sturdy enough to bear a crew plus a cannon weighing 16,000 pounds.

To an extent, the governors of the city acknowledged their debt to the workers of the Arsenale. They were a privileged group within the Venetian proletariat, acting as watchmen at the Palazzo Ducale whenever the Maggior Consiglio was in session, carrying the doge in triumph round the Piazza after his inauguration, and serving as pallbearers at ducal funerals. By the standards of other manual workers they were not badly paid either, although the 50 ducats that was the typical remuneration of a master shipwright in the primeval sixteenth century should be set against the 40,000 ducats spent by Alvise Pisani, one of the most powerful politicians of the period, on the weddings of his five daughters. The Arsenalotti were also less docile than most of their fellow artisans, and were responsible for a number of strikes and disturbances. A dramatic oppose took place in 1569, when a gang of 300 Arsenalotti armed with axes smashed their way into the hall of the Collegio to present their grievances to the doge in person.

The shores of the Lido have seen some action in their time: in 1202 a huge French army, assembled for the Fourth Crusade, cooled its heels on the beaches while its leaders haggled with the Venetians over the terms for transport to the East; Henry III of France was welcomed here in 1574 with fanfares and triumphal monuments prefabricated in his honour; and every year, for about eight centuries, there was the hullaballoo of Venice’s Marriage to the Sea .

This ritual, the most operatic of Venice’s state ceremonials, began as a way of commemorating the exploits of Doge Pietro Orseolo II, who on Ascension Day of the year 1000 set canvass to subjugate the pirates of the Dalmatian coast. (Orseolo’s standard, by the way, featured possibly the first representation of what was to become the emblem of Venice – the Lion of Saint Mark with its paw on an open book.) According to legend, the ritual reached its definitive form after the Venetians had brought about the reconciliation of Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa in 1177; the grateful Alexander is supposed to have given the doge the first of the gold rings with which Venice was married to the Adriatic. It’s more likely that the essential components of the ritual – the voyage out to the Porto di Lido in the Bucintoro with an escort of garlanded vessels, the dropping of the ring into the brine “In sign of our true and perpetual dominion”, and the disembarkation for a solemn Mass at the church of San Nicolò al Lido – were all fixed by the middle of the twelfth century. Unless you steadfastly shun all the public collections in Venice, you’re bound to see at least one painting of the ceremony during your stay. Nowadays the mayor, patriarch and a gaggle of other VIPs annually enact a depressing copier of the grand occasion. And in case you’re thinking of launching a salvage operation for all those gold rings, a fifteenth-century traveller recorded – “After the ceremony, many strip and dive to the bottom to seek the ring. He who finds it keeps it for his own, and, what’s more, lives for that year free from all the burdens to which dwellers in that republic are subject.”

In the twelfth century the Lido was an unspoilt strip of land, and it remained so into the last century. Byron used to sit his horses crossways the fields of the Lido every day, and as late as 1869 Henry saint could describe the island as “a very natural place”. Before the nineteenth century was out, however, it had become the smartest bathing resort in Italy, and although it’s no longer as chic as it was when Thomas Mann installed von Aschenbach, the central figure of Death in Venice , as a guest at the Lido’s Grand Hotel des Bains , there’s less room on its beaches now than ever before. But unless you’re staying at one of the flashy hotels that stand shoulder to shoulder along the seafront, or are prepared to pay a ludicrous fee to rent one of their beach hutches for the day, you won’t be allowed to get the choicest Lido sand between your toes.

If you’re the sort of mortal who regards access to the sea as a God-given right, then you’ll have to content yourself with the ungroomed public beaches at the northern and southern ends of the island – though if you’re tempted by the thought of a dip, bear in mind that this stretch of the Adriatic isn’t one of the cleanest. (The traffic, incidentally, is the other health hazard of the Lido. Just as the Venetians were once regarded as the worst riders in Italy, they are now ranked as its most inept drivers.) The northern beach is twenty minutes’ achievement from the vaporetto stop at Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta; the southern one, right by the municipal golf course, necessitates a bus journey from the Piazzale, and is consequently less of a crush.

Another of the Scuole Grandi nestles in a line of drab buildings very near to the Frari – the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista , founded in 1261 by one of the many flagellant confraternities that sprang up at that time. The quickest way to get to it is to take the bridge covering the Frari’s facade, turn left and then left again, then second right into Calle del Magazzen – the Scuola is halfway down on the left.

This institution’s finest hour came in 1369, when it was presented with a relic of the True Cross , an item that can be seen to this day in the first-floor Oratorio della Croce . The miracles effected by the relic were commemorated in the Oratory by a series of paintings by Carpaccio, Gentile composer and others, now transplanted to the Accademia.

Nowadays the delights of the Scuola are architectural. The courtyards are something of a composite: the mid-fifteenth-century deception of the Scuola incorporates two mid-fourteenth-century reliefs, and the screen of the outer courtyard was built in 1481 by Pietro Lombardo . The latter is one of Venice’s pleasantest surprises – approached from the train station direction it just looks like any old brick wall, but round the other side it reveals itself to be as delicate a piece of marble carving as any church interior could show. Inside, a grand double staircase built by Codussi in 1498 rises to the main hall and the Oratorio; the climb is more enjoyable than its culmination, as the hall is clad with lifeless paintings, many showing scenes from the life of Saint John, most of them by Domenico Tintoretto. The Scuola is open Monday to Friday 9.30am to 12.30pm; ring for admission – they might balk at letting you into the Oratorio, but there shouldn’t be any problem about getting a look at the Codussi bits, unless one of the Scuola’s frequent conferences is in progress.

The church of San Giovanni Evangelista is one of the select band of religious buildings in Venice that are of no interest whatsoever

The trip crossways the lagune to Chioggia is a more protracted business than simply taking the land bus from Piazzale Roma, but it will give you a curative dose of salt air and a good knowledge of the lagoon. From Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta – the main street from the Lido landing stage to the sea front – the more or less hourly #11 bus goes down to Alberoni , where it drives onto a ferry for the five-minute hop to Pellestrina; the 10km to the southern tip of Pellestrina are covered by road, and then you switch from the bus to a steamer for the 25-minute crossing to Chioggia. The entire journey takes about eighty minutes, and costs L7000/¬3.62 for a through-ticket, including the cost of the hop from San Zaccaria to the Lido – but be sure to check the timetable carefully at Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta – not every #11 goes all the way to Chioggia. The quickest way back to Venice is by bus from the Duomo or Sottomarina to Piazzale Roma, but it’s a dispiriting drive, is only about twenty minutes quicker than the island-hop route, and ACTV passes are not valid, as this is an extra-urban bus service. All in all, your best plan is to get an ACTV tourist ticket, or buy the special Chioggia ticket (L15,000/¬7.75), which gives unlimited travel along the Chioggia route for twelve hours.

The section of the lagune to the south of the city, enclosed by the long islands of the Lido and Pellestrina , has far fewer outcrops of solid land than the northern half. Once past San Giorgio Maggiore and La Giudecca , and clear of the smaller islands beyond, you could look in the direction of the mainland and think you were out in the open sea – an illusion strengthened by the sight of tankers making their way crossways the lagune to the port of Marghera. On the other hand, the shallowness of most of the lagune is brought home to you with a jolt when you happen upon a fisherman standing on a barely submerged sandbank a long way from the shore – a spectacle that initially makes you doubt the evidence of your senses.

The nearer islands are the more interesting: the Palladian churches of San Giorgio and La Giudecca are among Venice’s most significant Renaissance monuments, while the alleyways of the island are full of reminders of the city’s manufacturing past. The Venetian tourist industry began with the development of the Lido, which has now been eclipsed by the city itself as a holiday destination, yet still draws thousands of people to its beaches apiece year, many of them Italians. A visit to the Armenian island, San Lazzaro degli Armeni , makes an absorbing afternoon’s round trip, and if you’ve a bit more time to spare you could undertake an expedition to the fishing town of Chioggia , at the southern extremity of the lagoon. The farther-flung settlements along the route to Chioggia may have seen more glorious days, but the voyage out from the city is a pleasure in itself.