Museo Storico Navale: The Golden Barge That Married the Sea
Why is it significant?
Where the canal of the Arsenale meets the lagoon stands a broad, plain building that looks like a warehouse, because it was one. Old anchors lie outside, and inside, floor after floor, the story of Venice at sea is told in wood, rope, bronze and gilded carving.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Storico Navale: The Golden Barge That Married the Sea |
|---|---|
| Address | Riva San Biasio 2148, Castello, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43340, 12.34970 |
| Part of Walk | Lions, Shipyards and Saints: Venice's Castello and the Arsenale Beyond the Crowds |
| Generated | Generated |
Where the canal of the Arsenale meets the lagoon stands a broad, plain building that looks like a warehouse, because it was one. Old anchors lie outside, and inside, floor after floor, the story of Venice at sea is told in wood, rope, bronze and gilded carving.
The building was once a granary of the Republic, part of the stores that kept a city with no farmland fed through wars and sieges. The ship models it holds go back to the Arsenale itself, where builders kept models to show how a vessel should be made. The collection survived the fall of the Republic and the looting that followed, and the Italian navy opened it as a museum in 1919.
The star of the show is the Bucintoro, the golden state barge of the doges, seen here as a large model. Every year on Ascension Day the doge was rowed out in it to the mouth of the lagoon at the Lido, and dropped a gold ring into the water, declaring Venice married to the sea. The last Bucintoro, launched in 1729, was a floating palace of gilded sculpture, rowed by well over a hundred oarsmen.
Its end was brutal. In 1798, after the fall of the Republic, French soldiers stripped the barge and burned its carvings to recover the gold leaf. Only scraps of the ship survived. The Republic that had ruled the Adriatic for a thousand years was gone, and its most beautiful object went up in smoke to pay a foreign army.
Inside there is much more: gondolas from different centuries, galley models bristling with oars, cannons and the flags of old fleets. But even from the outside, you can feel how this whole district lived by the sea, and for the sea. Now walk a little further along the waterfront and turn left into the widest street in Venice, where the neighbourhood does its shopping.