Strada Nova & Campo San Felice
Why is it significant?
You are on the Strada Nova, and after the silence of the fondamente it can feel like a shock: a broad, straight street full of shops, bakeries and people walking fast with shopping bags. Look at the width of it. In a city of narrow calli, this is almost a boulevard.
Key Facts
| Place | Strada Nova & Campo San Felice |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo San Felice, Strada Nova, Cannaregio, 30121 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.44180, 12.33310 |
| Part of Walk | Venice Beyond the Crowds: Cannaregio and the Jewish Ghetto |
| Generated | Generated |
You are on the Strada Nova, and after the silence of the fondamente it can feel like a shock: a broad, straight street full of shops, bakeries and people walking fast with shopping bags. Look at the width of it. In a city of narrow calli, this is almost a boulevard.
Strada Nova simply means new street, and by Venetian standards it is brand new. It was cut through around 1870, a few years after Venice joined the Kingdom of Italy, by demolishing rows of houses to make a direct route from the railway station to Rialto. Officially it bears the name of King Vittorio Emanuele II, but hardly anybody uses it. A little further east, behind a wall on the Grand Canal side, stands the Ca' d'Oro with its golden Gothic face turned towards the water.
Now find the little canal beside the church of San Felice and look for a bridge with no parapets at all, just bare steps rising and falling over the water. That is the Ponte Chiodo, one of the very last of its kind. Once, almost every bridge in Venice looked like this, and people regularly tumbled into the canals at night... or were pushed.
A few steps west along the Strada Nova, in Campo Santa Fosca, stands the bronze statue of a friar, Paolo Sarpi. When the Pope placed Venice under interdict in 1606, Sarpi was the Republic's theologian and its sharpest defender. On an October evening in 1607, near the bridge of Santa Fosca, hired assassins stabbed him and left him for dead. He survived. The story goes that he joked he recognised the style of the Roman Curia... a pun on stylus, the Latin word for both a pen and a dagger.
Join the stream of people heading east, keeping the Ca' d'Oro on your right as you pass it. Cross a couple of bridges, and in a few minutes the street spills out into a busy square with a tall brick bell tower.