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20 Fast Facts About Venice

By Genevieve Richards

With so much written about Venice’s many virtues and countless splendours, it is often difficult to find “just the facts” about one of the world’s favourite cities.  Below are 20 fast facts about this enchanted city.

Venice is also known as “La Serenissima” (the most serenely beautiful one) and “Queen of the Adriatic”.

Venice really is built on water. The people of the Veneto region built the city on a salt marshland at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea.  The “official” date of the birth of Venice is the 25 March 421.

Venice has around 150 canals connected by 409 bridges, and over 3000 alleyways on the 117 islands. Basically every time you see a bridge it is connecting two islands.

The Grand Canal is the widest canal in Venice and divides the city into two parts, with three sestieri to the west (San Polo, Dorsoduro and Santa Croce) and three to the east (San Marco, Castello and Canneregio).  The Grand Canal is slightly longer than 2km long, and has an average depth of 4m.  

Only three bridges cross over the Grand Canal – The marble Ponte di Rialto built between 1588 - 1591, the wooden Ponte Accademia built in 1854 and the stone Ponte degli Scalzi which replaced the original iron bridge in 1858.

The population in Venice has halved over the last 50 years and is currently estimated to be in the region of 63,000 – most of the workers in Venice live on the mainland and travel by water to work each day. This relocation of residents is due to the high cost of living and the inconvenience of living away from the mainland.

Over 15 million tourists visit Venice each year.

There are an estimated 450 souvenir shops in Venice, with half the population involved in the tourist industry to some degree.

Venice is sinking. The mean level of the land has lowered while the sea levels have risen.

Flooding regularly occurs between November and March with the worst floods recorded on 4th November 1966 when tides rose more than 6ft in 24 hours flooding low lying areas of the city such as Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square). In order to stop this flooding construction of the controversial Moses Project started in May 2004. This is a system of 79 flood barriers fixed to the lagoon bed. At normal times the barriers will be full of water and lie flat but when there is a flood warning they will be pumped full of air and raised, therefore creating and dam and saving Venice from being flooded.

Amazingly, there are less than 20 plumbers in the city of Venice.

Isola di San Michele, a former prison, is Venice’s cemetery.  Because space is so limited on San Michele bodies are buried in tight rows of graves and are allowed to decompose for a mere twelve years before being dug up and the remains either moved into an urn or put with countless others in a nearby bone yard.

Crime, especially violent crime, is virtually non-existent in Venice.

Venice has no sewer system; household waste flows into the canals and is washed out into the ocean twice a day with the tides. 

A “calle” is a street, a “compo” is a square and there is only one compo large enough to be called a piazza in Venice – San Marco Piazza.

During the summer months St. Mark’s Square is full of tourists…and pigeons, hundred of pigeons. This is the only place in Venice where you are allowed to feed them with the authorities issuing large fines to those found disobeying the rules. The City of Venice issues a select few with licences to sell the seeds, and these licences are handed down from one generation to the next within the same family.

One of the most photographed images in the world is that of the Venice Gondolas. Gondolas are hand made using 8 different types of wood (fir, oak, cherry, walnut, elm, mahogany, larch and lime) and are composed of 280 pieces. The oars are made of beech wood and the left side of the gondola is made longer than the right side to counterbalance the weight of the gondolier. In the 16th-century a law was passed to ensure that all gondolas are painted with seven layers of black lacquer.

Venice was home to the world’s first factory: The Arsenal, founded in 1104, was a shipyard that apparently produced one warship nearly every day.

Many of Venice’s grand buildings are vacant or run down – they are simply too expensive to maintain.  There are also strict laws as to what redecoration and restoration can be carried out to the buildings, especially those fronting the Grand Canal.

No matter how adept you are at reading maps or “remembering your way around” you will get lost in Venice.

Bio:
Genevieve Richards was born and educated in South Africa and has lived in London since 1995.

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