N32 Autumn Blossom zine 2021

Discover venezia

{ Text and Photos Dana Frigerio } www.blossomzine.eu/blog blog@blossomzine.eu

If you have ever visited the lagoon city, you’ll have noticed that it seems to be born in a time without borders, almost from two infinite spaces... the water and the sky.

The barbarian invasion of the fourth century forced the Venetian populations to find refuge on the various islands of the lagoon, which is why the urbanization of the city is slightly different from that of other cities, there’s not only one nucleus, there are multiple centers and

they all are isolated from the water of the many canals.

Each urbanized island was formed around a field (campo), what we would call a piace, the name campo is due to the fact that it used to be a cultivated area, even cattle were grazed there and almost all the fields in Venice have a well at their center; just like all urban squares, the ‘campo’ was the social and commercial heart of the city.

A peculiarity: in Venice there is only one square,

and it is the most spectacular in the whole city: Piazza San Marco.

We do not even find the usual names such as streets, neighborhoods, alleys and squares but calli, sestrieri, campielli, fondamenta, rii and sotoporteghi; the “street” signs of the Venetian streets are painted on the walls, a white rectangle surrounded by a black square called nizioleto (little sheet) indicating the name of the street, bridge or

stream. The origin of the names is linked to the life of the city, some names owe theirs to a more or less famous person who lived in that area. In other cases, the names were dedicated to the craft activities of the place, and, as it often happened in many other medieval cities, some manual and working activities were concentrated in specific areas. If we wanted to count the calli of Venice they would be over

3000, but there is a really particular one, the narrowest, which reaches 53 cm (20,86 in) in its final part. it’s Calle Varisco in the Cannaregio district.

steps in Istrian stone (used in Venice for its high resistance to saline corrosion) that lead directly to the canal to allow the mooring of the boats.

A name that we find only in this timeless city is the ‘sotoportego’, which is a passage, a connection between calli or campielli and was obtained by ‘digging’, both in height and in width, a portion of the building.

Another uniqueness is the Fondamenta, a stretch of road that runs along the canal, you will often notice

The houses that border and are adjacent to the canals have the main entrances facing the water and the secondary ones for the servants directly on the ‘calle’.

Since there are no connections between the various islands, the main Venetian means of transport was and still is the boat. There are several flat-bottomed boats that sail along

the canals, from the typical gondola, to the sanpierota, from the sandolo to the mascareta to the pupparìn, and the list would be very long due to the differences between the various transports, people or goods, and for the different functions and activities.

Only in the mid-1200s the various islands began to be connected to one another, at first with simple wooden walkways without parapets that only in the following years were replaced with stone structures; speaking of numbers, there are 435 bridges in the city.

The most famous and ancient bridge is that of Rialto, built in the second half of the 12th century in wood, with a structure of two inclined ramps and a central area that was raised to allow ships to pass.

Damaged a few years later, it was rebuilt in stone in the 16th century, characteristic with a single central arch and three parallel tiers, in the middle one there are still shops today; until the eighteenth century it was the only link between the two parts of the city.