Via Garibaldi: A Canal Turned into Castello's Living Room
Why is it significant?
Turn into a broad, busy street that looks almost wrong for Venice: wide enough for market stalls and café tables, laundry flying overhead between the houses, and old ladies with shopping trolleys walking in pairs.
Key Facts
| Place | Via Garibaldi: A Canal Turned into Castello's Living Room |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, Castello, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43270, 12.35400 |
| Part of Walk | Lions, Shipyards and Saints: Venice's Castello and the Arsenale Beyond the Crowds |
| Generated | Generated |
Turn into a broad, busy street that looks almost wrong for Venice: wide enough for market stalls and café tables, laundry flying overhead between the houses, and old ladies with shopping trolleys walking in pairs. This is Via Garibaldi, the widest street in Venice, and the beating heart of everyday Castello.
It is wide because it used to be water. A canal ran here until 1807, when, under Napoleon's rule, it was filled in to make a grand avenue. It was first called Via Eugenia, after Napoleon's stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of Italy, and after Venice joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 it took Garibaldi's name. It is one of only a handful of streets in the city that carry the word via at all. Everywhere else you walk a calle, a ruga, a salizada or a fondamenta.
Look along the house fronts for a plaque which claims that Giovanni Caboto lived here. Caboto, a navigator who became a Venetian citizen in 1476, is better known by his English name, John Cabot. Sailing from Bristol for the King of England in 1497, he reached the coast of North America, probably Newfoundland... a Venetian citizen touching the New World only five years after Columbus.
This is still a street for locals, where the fishmonger knows your grandmother and the bar will pour you an ombra, a small glass of wine, at nine in the morning without judgement. At the far end, where the street meets the gardens, a bronze Garibaldi stands on a rocky pedestal, surrounded by figures that include one of his red-shirted volunteers.
Listen to how people talk here, across the street and from window to window. Castello was the district of sailors, rope-makers and shipwrights, and it still has their bluntness and their warmth. Walk to the end of the street and follow the canal straight ahead, along Fondamenta Sant'Anna, toward a white bell tower that leans just a little, then cross the bridge onto the island of San Pietro.