Rio Terà San Leonardo: Cannaregio's Everyday Market

Why is it significant?

You are on a broad, busy street lined with fruit and vegetable stalls, fishmongers, bakeries and bars, full of locals with shopping trolleys pushing through the stream of travellers from the station. It is noisy, practical and deeply Venetian, and it smells of oranges and fried fish.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are on a broad, busy street lined with fruit and vegetable stalls, fishmongers, bakeries and bars, full of locals with shopping trolleys pushing through the stream of travellers from the station. It is noisy, practical and deeply Venetian, and it smells of oranges and fried fish.

The words rio terà mean a filled-in canal. This street was water until the nineteenth century, when it was filled in to make walking easier, and that is why it is so wide and so straight. Every morning the market stalls set up along it, and this is where Cannaregio, the most populous district of the city, buys its food.

Here, think of the home cooking of Venice, the dishes that rarely make it onto restaurant menus. Bigoli in salsa: thick spaghetti, traditionally of wholewheat flour, squeezed through a hand-cranked press called a bigolaro, then tossed with onions melted slowly with salted anchovies or sardines. It was the dish for lean days, for the Fridays of Lent and for Christmas Eve, and it costs almost nothing to make.

And polenta, the cornmeal porridge that changed the diet of the Veneto after maize arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century. In Venice it is preferred white, soft and almost runny, served under fish, while on the mainland it is yellow and firm enough to slice. For centuries polenta kept poor families alive; today it carries the baccalà and the liver you have already met on this walk.

Watch the people for a moment: a grandmother arguing about the price of artichokes, a man buying exactly three sardines, a lost traveller dragging a suitcase over the stones. Then follow the long street east, through Rio Terà de la Maddalena and the Strada Nova, and turn right into Campo Santa Sofia, down to the edge of the Grand Canal.