The Layout of Venice

Making sense of the tnagle of canals, calle, campi that make up the sestieri (neighborhoods) of Venice's city layout

There's no two ways about it: Venice has one of the most confusing, frustrating, and unfathomable layouts of any city.

On the surface, it looks simple: a few big islands wrapped around the sweeping backward-S curve of the breathtaking, palace-lined Canale Grande (Grand Canal), with lots of smaller canals—176 of them—worming their way through those islands.

The reality is much more complicated. Buy the best map you can find, take a deep breath, and prepare to get lost repeatedly.

Getting Used to Venice's (Lack of A) Street Plan

A Street by Any Other Word
Venice doesn't use the same labels for its streets and squares as the rest of Italy. A calle, ruga, or ramo is a street, a rio terrà a street made from a filled-in canal, and a fondamenta or riva a sidewalk along the edge of a canal. A campo or campiello is a square (Piazza San Marco, Piazzetta San Marco, and Piazzale Roma being the exceptions). A canale or rio is a canal.

The Venetian map is a big tangled bowl of spaghetti. Venice has two overlapping infrastructures, one of narrow streets and the other of canals. These networks sometimes work together, and sometimes interfere with each other. The impossibly twisty, narrow alleyways of the city often end abruptly in a blank wall, or run you in circles, or suddenly turn into steps that disappear into a canal. Constant backtracking is inevitable.

Occasionally, the alleyways will get you from one place to another, or spill unexpectedly into a large campo (square), or lead over one of the thousands of tiny arched marble bridges straddling the canals—the most magnificent is the Rialto bridge over the Grand Canal—and dump you into another crazy tangle of streets on the other side.

Little signs with arrows are scattered along the main routes from one major landmark to another—San Marco, Rialto (the main bridge), Ferrovia (train station)—and the sharp-eyed can follow these along the convoluted path all the way from, say, the train station to Piazza San Marco (in about 30-45 minutes).

Plan on any journey taking three times as long as you imagine, and don't fret about being late. Setting out from your hotel door in Venice is always an adventure—as long as you treat it as such, you'll have fun getting lost.

The Sestieri (Neighborhoods) of Venice

The Venice we all know and dream about lies 2.5 miles from dry land, connected to the mainland sister city of Venezia-Mestre (never be fooled into staying in this bland, industrial city a ten minute train ride from the real Venice; if the hotel says its in Mestre, just say "no") by the Ponte della Libertà, which leads to Piazzale Roma.

Venice's chaotic map is divided into six sestieri, or "sixths"—which doesn't include the some 168 outlying islands (but we won't worry about most of those).

The center of Venice is the San Marco district, much of which is very touristy today. Here you'll find the gorgeous Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Square), with its cathedral and Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace). The extension of Piazza San Marco that runs along the Palazzo Ducale to the Grand Canal is called Piazzetta San Marco. The San Marco district is home to hundreds of souvenir shops, the priciest hotels, the world-renowned (and recently burned down, but being rebuilt) La Scala opera house, and many (generally expensive) restaurants.

East of San Marco lies the large Castello neighborhood, which features a classy stretch of lagoon-front property called Riva degli Schiavoni (it starts where Piazzetta San Marco hits the Grand Canal's mouth), home to a plethora of upscale hotels. Castello is focused upon the Arsenale, the old ship-building sector of the city—still a navy yard, and hence mostly closed to the public.

In the Ghetto
In the early 1500s, Venice forced its Jewish residents to move into a sector of the city where they lived in semi–self-governed isolation, cut off from opportunities and much movement within the rest of Venice. They called it in their Venetian dialect "ghetto." In an age of intolerance, other closed-minded cities thought this was a capital idea and the practice spread rapidly throughout Europe.

The first neighborhood you'll see, however, whether taking the train or driving in, is the Canareggio, on the very north end of the city above the top curve of the Grand Canal's backward "S". Canareggio also has the dubious honor of incorporating Europe's first Jewish Ghetto (see sidebar). There is, as usual, cheap lodging right around the train station, but it's mainly a residential neighborhood and unless you're coming up here to see specific sights, you probably won't hang around too long.

San Polo (a.k.a. San Paolo) fills up much of the area on the west side of the Grand Canal, a commercial district with lots of moderately priced hotels, shops, and trattorie, as well as some big ol' churches that beckon the sightseer.

To its north, lying along the underside of the top curve in that backwards "S," is the sestiere of Santa Croce, half industrial and half filled with sleepy old palazzi along the Grand Canal, all very untouristed.

The name of any given street or campo can be used only once within a Venetian neighborhood—but there's no rule against the next sestiere over using the same label. As a result, the most popular names (like Calle della Madonna) pop up three or four times on the map, but refer to streets miles apart from one another. This is why it's vitally important to ascertain the sestiere along with any address. Oh, and by the way: The street-numbering system in Venice is completely and totally without any logic whatsoever.

Across the Grand Canal from San Marco is the most southerly of districts, the Dorsoduro. It's the trendiest quarter in a city that, despite its reputation for a Carnival to rival Rio's, doesn't seem to have heard of nightlife. The area is sparsely populated and has a smattering of bars and cafes, some good trattorie and cheap hotels, and Venice's two great art museums, the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim.

Not one of the core six sestieri but visible from downtown Venice is Giudecca, a long curving island paralleling Dorsoduro to the south and accessible only by boat. It's a tranquil working-class place, mostly a residential neighborhood but also home to the official youth hostel and a handful of hotels (including the fabled Cipriani, one of Europe's finest).

Outlying Islands

The seven-mile-long sliver of faded-glory beach resort known as Lido di Venezia is the city's sandy beach, a popular summer destination for its concentration of seasonal hotels (and the locale for the famous short story A Death in Venice). It separates the lagoon from the sea and is accessible by car.

In the lagoon north of central Venice lie Murano, Burano, and Torcello, easily accessible by public transport vaporetto. This is one of my favorite ways to spend a day in Venice, so I've laid out all the details on how to spend a day in the outlying islands on a seperate page. Here's a short-take on each:

Since the 13th century, Murano has exported its glass products worldwide; it's an interesting day trip for those with the time, but you can do just as well in "downtown" Venice's myriad glass stores. Colorful fishing village–style Burano was and still is equally famous for its lace, an art now practiced by so few island women its prices are generally unaffordable.

Torcello is the most remote and least populated. The 40-minute boat ride is worthwhile for history and art buffs who'll be awestruck by the Byzantine mosaics of the cathedral (some of Europe's finest outside Ravenna's) whose foundation dates to the 7th century, making this the oldest Venetian monument in existence. Along the way, you pass the Isola di San Michele, Venice's cemetery island where such celebrities as Stravinsky and Diaghilev are buried.