Itineraries

Nine stops from Campo Santo Stefano across the Accademia bridge into Dorsoduro: a church with a ship’s-keel roof and a bell tower out of true, the monument Venice nicknamed the cagalibri, the yard where gondolas are still built, a church with two front doors, the eighteenth-century palace of Ca’ Rezzonico, the bridge where Venice used to fight, the building that stands alone in Campo Santa Margherita, the university on the Grand Canal, and the church of San Pantalon.

Eight stops from the oldest bridge on the Grand Canal through the market, the stone Venice read its sentences from, the fish hall with the minimum sizes carved in marble, the bridge on the edge of the licensed quarter, and the three great halls of San Giovanni Evangelista, the Frari and San Rocco.

Ten stops from Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo to Piazza San Marco and on towards Campo Manin: a hospital behind the marble front of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, the church of the Miracoli, a bookshop named after the high water, the Bridge of Sighs, the two columns at the water’s edge where the Republic carried out its sentences, the tower that fell in 1902, the basilica, the clock that has been read from the paving since 1499, the staircase of the Contarini del Bovolo, and a filled-in canal named after the murders on its bridge.

Ten places across Cannaregio, each opened by a short video filmed and narrated on site by Andrea Manzo: the two Ghetto squares, a cinema that became a supermarket, the palace of the Turkish merchants, Codussi on the Grand Canal, a round church with an eye over the door, four stone men in a wall, Sansovino’s hall that was a basketball court, the last bridge without a parapet, and the narrowest street in the city.

Nine stops from the Roman gate of Bàrcino to Santa Maria del Mar, each opening with a 360° panorama: the walk through a medieval quarter that was largely assembled in the twentieth century, out of stones carried here from streets that no longer exist.

Four works Carlo Scarpa left inside the historic city, walked west to east in under three kilometres. It begins at the Tolentini with the gate he drew from 1966 for the school of architecture and never saw built: a tilted canopy, a gate balanced between stone and glass, a Gothic portal laid flat in water — completed in 1985, seven years after his death, and now taken out of use so that it can be looked at. Then the Aula Mario Baratto, the ceremonial hall of Ca’ Foscari on the piano nobile of its Gothic palace, and the Negozio Olivetti under the Procuratie: 118 square metres built in 1957–58, the smallest major architectural work in Italy and the most studied. It ends at the Querini Stampalia, where his water garden sits behind a palazzo open as a home museum since 1869.