Question 1

What exactly did Venice ban at Rialto, and when?

Accepted Answer

The ruga under its awnings, on the way to the bridge. Photo: Luigi De Marchi

Resolution no. 73 of the Venice city council, dated 5 June 2003, names five parts of the city — Rialto and San Polo, Rio Terà San Leonardo, via Garibaldi, Campo Santa Margherita — and states that in those areas “new openings and transfers” of businesses selling seventeen listed categories of goods are not permitted.

The list is worth reading in full, because it contains a surprise: costume jewellery and trinkets; souvenirs; Venetian specialities; keepsakes of Venice; products of Venetian craftsmanship — glass, lace, embroidery; local craft articles; artistic reproductions and objects; gift items; ethnic objects; guides, maps and illustrated material about Venice; postcards; carnival articles and costumes; masks; clothing accessories and knitwear; sunglasses sold apart from proper opticians; photographic material sold on its own; sportswear sold as a souvenir; and pizza by the slice.

Glass, lace and embroidery are on that list — the real thing, not the imitation. The council of 2003 was not defending craftsmanship against cheap imports. It was trying to stop a monoculture: five addresses in the city where every shopfront had begun to sell the same category of object, whatever its quality. The ban treats authentic Murano glass and a plastic gondola as the same problem, because at that density they had become the same problem.

And the stalls remain because the rule governs new openings and transfers. It is not retroactive. Twenty-three years on, that single clause explains most of what a visitor sees from the bridge: the trade at Rialto is not an abuse of the rules. It is what the rules froze in place.

The city has kept legislating since. A council resolution of 2019, extended in 2022, gave separate rules to the shops facing the bridge and the surrounding Realtina area — Ponte degli Oresi, Sotoportego dei Oresi, Sotoportego Rialto, Campo San Giacomo di Rialto, Naranzaria and Erbaria. That protection ran from 3 May 2022 to 3 May 2025. On 9 April 2025, three weeks before it lapsed, the city government approved the regulation Venetians call the delibera antipaccottiglia, the junk-goods resolution: glassware sold in the regulated area must now document its production chain and display the Murano artistic glass mark, a commission examines each application to open, and a business can be closed immediately if the declaration it filed proves false. A further resolution of 8 May 2025 extended the approach to the whole sestiere of San Marco and the high-footfall streets.

There is also a door. A city government resolution of 2018 allows exemptions from the 2003 ban for businesses presenting “projects aimed at the requalification of the protected areas”. How many exemptions have been granted, to whom, and for what projects, is not published anywhere we could find.

Question 2

What does “intangible cultural heritage” actually mean?

Accepted Answer

The Sotoportego dei Oresi, the goldsmiths’ passage between the bridge and the market. Photo: Luigi De Marchi

The word is used loosely, so it is worth going back to the text. The UNESCO Convention of 2003 defines intangible cultural heritage as the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills that a community recognises as its own — heritage “transmitted from generation to generation”, constantly recreated by communities in response to their environment, and giving them “a sense of identity and continuity”. Among the five domains it lists is traditional craftsmanship.

Read that definition once more and a consequence falls out of it. If this kind of heritage exists only in being handed on, then removing the generation that should receive it does not weaken it. It ends it. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is what the definition says, and the definition has been signed by most of the world.

A few metres from the stalls, the Sotoportego dei Oresi shows what the handing on used to look like in practice. Every craftsman whose shop faced the passage undertook to have the vault frescoed in front of his own door: prestige for the shop, maintenance for a public building, at no cost to the city. Those vaults still carry part of their painting, and they are among the last external frescoes visible anywhere in Venice.

What remains of the painting on one of the vaults. Photo: Luigi De Marchi

The goldsmiths who paid for it divided their trade between the two Rughe of Rialto: rings and small objects in one, large pieces in the other. Their speciality was filigree — opus veneciarum — and the pieces known as manini, worked in a mesh of very fine gold. The passage is still lined with jewellers. The knowledge that produced the vaults above them is not.

Protected: Venice banned souvenir shops at Rialto in 2003. The stalls are still there

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A monthly letter from the Cultural Heritage Online editors.

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