Heritage Walk — What Holds Venice Up

Venice is crossed without thinking. This walk takes the most obvious thing in the city — its bridges — and looks at them as a maintenance problem: who built them, from what, how many times they have been rebuilt, and who looks after them now so they carry thirty million visitors a year.

It starts at the Ponte degli Scalzi, rebuilt in Istrian stone in the 1930s to replace the Austrian iron bridge, and reaches the two bridges no guidebook names: the pair Eugenio Miozzi threw across the Rio Novo in 1933, ten minutes from the station, when Venice cut itself a new shortcut through water for the first time in centuries. In between are Antonio da Ponte’s Rialto and the Bridge of Sighs — the two everybody photographs, told for once from the side of the people who hold them up.

It is a walk about maintenance, not about monuments. It is how the association reads this year’s theme, «Protecting Heritage. Renew, Resist, Reinvent»: not opening a place for two days, but describing the work that keeps it open on all the others.

How to join

Practical details

• When: Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September 2026, one departure each day
• Meeting point: 10.30 at Campo San Simon Piccolo, beside the church of San Simeon Piccolo (Santa Croce) — the bank opposite the station, at the foot of the green dome
• Duration: about two hours, ending around 12.30
• Cost: free, with nothing asked of participants
• Route: about 3.4 km on foot, five stops. A step-free alternative runs along the Fondamenta for anyone who cannot manage the bridge steps
• Led by: Andrea Manzo, volunteer guide of the association and author of the itinerary
• Getting there: two minutes on foot from Santa Lucia station, served by trains and vaporetti

The group does not stop on the bridges or their access ramps, as the city regulation requires: the bridges are read from the fondamenta and the campi facing them, which for the Scalzi and the Rialto is also the better view. No loudspeakers are used.

The route, before and after

The full itinerary — map, numbered stops and a downloadable GPS track — is published and stays online after the event:

What Holds Venice Up: Six Bridges from the Lagoon Crossing to the Bridge of Sighs

Every stop has its own documented entry, with checked sources:

• Ponte della Libertà — the crossing of the lagoon
• Ponte degli Scalzi — Istrian stone in place of iron
• Ponte de la Cereria — Miozzi on the Rio Novo, 1933
• Ponte del Pagan — its brick twin
• Ponte di Rialto — Antonio da Ponte, 1591
• Bridge of Sighs

Who runs it

The walk is organised by the Associazione Beni Culturali Online APS (ABCO APS), entered in the Italian third-sector register (RUNTS) on 31 July 2026, within the European Heritage Days 2026 — the Council of Europe programme coordinated in Italy by the Ministry of Culture.

It is the first of the Passeggiate Patrimoniali, a programme the association intends to repeat in other places and at other times.

Cover photograph: the Ponte de la Cereria on the Rio Novo. Photo: Stefano Vigolo.