Italy · Old Town
Venice
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Venice is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Basilica di San Marco 1,500 points
It closes the east end of this walk, and I would not hurry the last stretch. The face of it is a wall of columns and coloured stone fetched in from elsewhere, a piece at a time, and almost none of it matches. Go in and look down rather than up. The floor is not flat.
Campanile di San Marco 500 points
The thing worth knowing before you get there is that it is not attached to anything. You can make a complete circle of its foot, which you cannot do with anything else on this piazza. At the base, facing the water, sits a small marble porch that has nothing to do with bells. There is also a lift, and I have no opinion about that whatsoever.
Palazzo Ducale 500 points
You can go under one whole side of it without paying anybody, which is my favourite sort of architecture. Stop at the seaward corner and look hard at the facing: pink and white slabs set in a diamond pattern that makes masonry look woven. Then find the capitals on the two outer corners and count what is carved into them.
Ponte di Rialto 500 points
It is not one path, it is three. Two run along the outer edges and a third climbs up the middle, between two rows of little shops that stand right on the arch. Take an outer one going over and the middle one coming back, and you have had the same bridge two ways.
Ca' Farsetti 250 points
From the lane you get its back and not much else. Go round to Riva del Carbon and look at it from the water side, where the arches are, because that is the side it was made to be seen from. Almost everything on that bank is like this. The good face points at a street I cannot walk.
Campo Santo Stefano 250 points
This is the one open ground on the walk where nothing is pressing in on you: long, wide, trees, and children playing ball, which almost nowhere else here allows. Find the stone well-head out on the paving. Every campo had one, and the ground was laid to run rain into the cistern beneath it. A floor with two jobs, and I have never met a better one.
Museo Correr 250 points
The door is at the far end of the big piazza, the end furthest from the church, and the stair behind it is grander than most palaces manage. Go for the windows rather than the cases. They run the whole length of the square and look straight down onto the paving you just crossed. This is the one address in this city where I can study a floor from a seated position.
Teatro La Fenice 250 points
Finding it is half the job. It hides on a small campo off the shopping lanes, with no space in front of it to step back and admire anything, and the lane that gets you there is called after it. Look for the water door on the canal side instead: people still turn up at it by boat.
Name origin
Why it is called Venice.
Venice took its name second-hand. The plain behind the lagoon belonged to a people the Romans called the Veneti, and nobody has settled what that word meant: either an Indo-European word for something like the noble ones, or a word older than Latin that sat somewhere near strangers and newcomers. The city itself was written down first as civitas Rivoalti, the city of Rialto, and only afterwards as civitas Venetiarum. So the name came off a whole plain and shrank until it fitted a handful of islands.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Nobody chose this ground for its quality. The lagoon islands were half empty before the city arrived: fishing stations and stopping places, some lived on, some not. Then people from the mainland moved their households out here and stayed. The site sits four kilometres off the mainland, on the line between the living lagoon that the tide still flushes and the dead one it no longer reaches. Even the capital could not settle: it went from Oderzo to a newly built town in the north, then to Malamocco, and only then to the islands at the centre. The whole thing grew on 118 islets. I have never eaten anywhere with less bedrock under it and more opinions on top.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Why then
When the first stone went down.
There is no founding day here. People came out to the islands over two or three centuries, and for a long while this was one district of an empire run from a very long way east. A stone on Torcello puts that arrangement on record in 639. Ravenna's grip on Italy fell apart in 751, which left the lagoon governing itself more or less by accident, and the city proper was assembled in the ninth and tenth centuries. Four hundred years to become a place. That is a schedule I can work with.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 639–751
Byzantium, at arm's length. The lagoon was one district of an empire governed from Constantinople through the exarch at Ravenna, and the man in charge out here carried the title magister militum. A stone on Torcello puts that on record in 639. In 751 Ravenna's hold on Italy came apart, and the islands were left running themselves.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
- 751–1797
The doges. For roughly a thousand years the decisions about this place were taken in this place, which is rarer than it sounds. Then the circle narrowed: two laws of doge Pietro Gradenigo, in 1297 and 1299, fixed who was allowed to sit on the council that ran the state, and the door stayed shut afterwards. The last doge was Ludovico Manin, and the state stopped existing in 1797 at the treaty of Campoformio. A thousand years, then a signature. I have gone longer than that without moving.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
- 1797–1866
Other people's paperwork. Napoleon handed the city to Austria at Campoformio in 1797, and on their way out the French emptied the Arsenale, the state shipyard. Austria then held the city until 1866, with a French spell in the middle. Sixty-nine years in which not much was built here and, as far as I could tell from the pavement, not much was decided here either.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
- 1866–
Italy. The railway had already arrived in 1846 over a bridge of its own, and only after 1866 could anyone draw up a proper plan for the port. What got decided was to put the new port and the industry on the mainland at Marghera and leave the old islands to their stones. Best division of labour anybody has proposed here in nine hundred years.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
The emblem
What the shield means.
The city does not put its own arms on this icon, and there is a reason. The shield is a gold winged lion with a halo, head turned to the front, crouched, holding an open silver book with five words of Latin written across it, and it is topped not by the walled crown every other Italian city gets but by the cap the doges wore. Splendid, and completely gone at the size of a thumbnail. So the icon is the bell tower instead: a square brick shaft twelve metres to a side, a belfry above that, a spire above that, and an archangel on top whose job, since 1513, has been to turn with the wind.
Sources: it.wikipedia.org, www.basilicasanmarco.it
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The lanes here were not paved until 1676, and what went down then was trachyte, quarried in the Euganean hills on the mainland and shipped out across the lagoon. The slabs were called salizzoni, which is why a street here can be a Salizada. So every stone underfoot in this level is an incomer. Coarse chew. I recommend it.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Count the bridges and you land at about four hundred, nearly all of them stone or brick. It was not always so. Stone arches only came into use in 1486, and before that a crossing here was timber, which is a thing you keep having to replace. So this city solved the problem of having no roads four hundred separate times, one small hump at a time.
Sources: www.treccani.it
The Grand Canal is the main street and it cannot be walked. Three thousand eight hundred metres long, thirty to seventy wide, bent into a great backwards S that cuts the city into two unequal parts, with forty-five smaller channels feeding into it and well over a hundred palaces standing along its edges. This level runs along one side of it and crosses it twice. The best street in this city is the one I will never get to eat.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- calle
- The ordinary word for a street. 150 of the 291 names in this level are a Calle, and most of them say what was made or sold there: Calle dei Fabbri the smiths, Calle del Forner the baker, Calle de le Botteghe the shops.
- corte
- A courtyard that counts as a street, and as a rule there is no way out at the far end. Corte Vecia, Corte del Forno Vecio, Corte de la Cerva. Thirty-six of them here. Go in, look, come back out, and take the dots with you.
- campo
- An open space. Exactly one name in this level is a Piazza and two are a Piazzetta. Everything else that widens out is a Campo, and a small one is a Campiello. Campo San Luca, Campo San Fantin, Campiello Nuovo, Campiello de la Chiesa.
- fondamenta
- A street with water down one side. If a name starts with Fondamenta, expect a canal on your left or your right the whole way and no railing to speak of. Fondamenta Orseolo, Fondamenta de le Ostreghe, Fondamenta Sansovino.
- ramo
- A branch. A Ramo is a short stub hanging off a longer street, often only a few metres of it, and it takes the parent's name with Ramo in front. Ramo dei Fuseri, Ramo del Carro, Ramo Primo Barozzi. Fifteen small mouthfuls.
- sotoportego
- A street that goes under a building, so somebody's floor is your ceiling for a few paces. Sotoportego de le Acque, Sotoportego del Cavalletto, Sottoportego dei Dai. The signs cannot agree on how many t's the word needs.
- rio terà
- A canal that was filled in and handed over to walkers. Rio Terà San Paternian, Rio Terà de la Mandola, Rio Terà de le Colonne. Four of them in this level, and you will feel it: they are wider and straighter than anything they run between, because a boat needed the room first.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 291streets
- 1,461dots
- 19.6km of street
- 26.1km on foot
- 7.5hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.