Doge's Palace & The Bridge of Sighs: Power and Captivity

Why is it significant?

Step onto the Ponte della Paglia along the waterfront and look along the canal at the enclosed white limestone span of the Bridge of Sighs.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step onto the Ponte della Paglia along the waterfront and look along the canal at the enclosed white limestone span of the Bridge of Sighs. Designed in sixteen hundred by architect Antonio Contin, its barred stone windows connect the interrogation rooms of the Doge's Palace directly to the Prigioni Nuove, the New Prisons across the water.

Romantic poets like Lord Byron gave the bridge its melancholy name in the nineteenth century, imagining condemned prisoners sighing in sorrow as they caught their final glimpse of the open lagoon and sky before disappearing into dark dungeon cells for life.

The Doge's Palace was the nerve center of Venetian naval and commercial power for centuries. Notice the lower arcades of white Istrian stone and pink Verona marble: on the second-story loggia facing the Piazzetta, two columns are made of distinctly red marble. Between those two red columns, the Doge stood to announce death sentences to the public below.

The infamous adventurer and libertine Giacomo Casanova was imprisoned on the top floor of this palace under the lead roofs, the Piombi, in seventeen fifty-five, pulling off a daring escape through the roof shingles fifteen months later.

Weave through the narrow calli into the hidden courtyard of Scala Contarini del Bovolo.