Art on the Water: Dorsoduro, the Accademia and the Zattere in Venice

From Peggy Guggenheim's unfinished palace through Titian, Veronese and Tiepolo, past a working gondola yard, the sunny Zattere and the bridge of the fistfights, to the palace where Robert Browning died

Venice · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Palazzo Venier dei Leoni

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Dorsoduro 701, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

From the gate on the quiet calle you see only a wall, a garden and a long, low white building. Walk through to the Grand Canal side, though, and you discover a palace that simply stops after a single storey, as if somebody had run out of patience halfway through a sentence.

That is the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the most famous unfinished palace in Venice. The Venier family began building it in 1749, planning a vast marble palace to rival anything on the canal. Then the money, or the will, ran out, and only the ground floor was ever completed. The name, of the lions, comes from the lion heads carved along the waterfront, and from a legend that the family once kept a real lion in the garden.

In 1949 the palace was bought by Peggy Guggenheim, an American heiress who had spent the years around the outbreak of war in Paris buying modern art at the rate, she said, of a picture a day. She filled these rooms with Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Kandinsky, Pollock and Max Ernst, whom she had married, opened her house to visitors, and was rowed around the canals in one of the last private gondolas in the city, with her little dogs on board.

On the terrace over the canal stands Marino Marini's bronze horseman, the Angel of the City, arms flung wide and, let us say, very visibly delighted to see Venice. The story goes that the most enthusiastic part of him was made to be unscrewed, and that Peggy removed it on the days when processions of nuns passed by on the water.

Peggy died in 1979, and her ashes lie in the garden, beside the graves of her beloved dogs, whom she called her babies. The collection passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, founded by her uncle. Leave by the calle and follow the little campi and bridges west for five minutes, towards the wooden bridge and the great museum at its foot.
2. Gallerie dell'Accademia

Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro 1050, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

In front of you, at the foot of the famous wooden bridge, stands a building that looks more like a church and a convent glued together than a museum. And that is exactly what it is. The Gallerie dell'Accademia live in the old Scuola della Carità, its church and its monastery, three buildings knitted into one treasure house of Venetian painting.

The academy of fine arts was founded in 1750, and in 1807, under Napoleon, it moved here. That was no coincidence. Napoleon's administration was closing dozens of churches, convents and confraternities, and thousands of paintings suddenly needed a home. Altarpieces that had hung above candles and incense ended up on museum walls, which is why the collection reads like a tour of Venice's lost churches.

One painting never had to move at all. In the old meeting room of the confraternity hangs Titian's Presentation of the Virgin, painted in the 1530s for exactly that wall. A little girl in blue climbs an enormous staircase all alone, while at the bottom an old woman with a basket of eggs sits completely uninterested in the miracle above her. Look too for Giorgione's Tempest, a small, mysterious canvas that nobody has ever fully explained.

And then there is the trial. In 1573 Paolo Veronese painted a huge Last Supper for a Dominican convent, crowded with dwarfs, dogs, drunken soldiers and Germans with halberds. The Inquisition summoned him and asked what all those people were doing at the Lord's table. Veronese defended the freedom of painters, and in the end he simply changed the title. It became the Feast in the House of Levi, and the problem disappeared along with the name.

The museum even owns Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the man in a circle and a square, but the drawing is so fragile that it is shown only rarely. Now turn your back on the bridge and walk straight south down the wide Rio Terà, towards the light, until you reach the Giudecca Canal.
3. The Zattere & the Gesuati

Fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati, Dorsoduro, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Breathe in. After the narrow calli, the Zattere is a gift: a long stone promenade full of sun, the broad Giudecca Canal in front of you, and across the water the white façade of Palladio's Redentore. Behind you stands a tall white church with a temple front, the Gesuati.

The name Zattere comes from rafts, zattere, because this is where timber and goods floated down from the mainland were unloaded. The quay is one of the few places in Venice that faces south, so on a winter afternoon half the city seems to be here, sitting on the steps with a coffee or an ice cream, faces turned to the sun. Every July, for the Festa del Redentore, a temporary bridge of boats crosses from here to that church, and the night explodes with fireworks.

Step inside the Gesuati, Santa Maria del Rosario, and look straight up. The church was built by Giorgio Massari in the 1720s and 1730s, and the ceiling is by Giambattista Tiepolo: Saint Dominic and the Institution of the Rosary, painted at the end of the 1730s. Figures float, tumble and climb a staircase into a sky so bright that it seems to open the roof. This is Tiepolo inventing the luminous Venice of the eighteenth century.

The Giudecca Canal has also seen the city's fiercest modern argument. For years gigantic cruise ships glided along it, taller than the bell towers, right past this quay. Residents protested, the world's press took notice, and since August 2021 the largest ships have been banned from the canal. Now it belongs again to ferries, barges and the occasional sailing boat.

The Gesuati who gave the church its name were a small order of lay brothers, suppressed in 1668, and the Dominicans who took over gave the building its glory. Now walk a few steps west along the Zattere to the next canal, Rio di San Trovaso, and follow it inland. On the far bank you will see something that looks as if it belongs in the Alps.
4. Squero di San Trovaso

Campo San Trovaso, Dorsoduro 1097, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Across the canal, look at the wooden house with flowers on its balconies, the dark sheds, and the boats hauled up on a sloping ramp at the water's edge. It looks like a mountain chalet that took a wrong turn. This is the Squero di San Trovaso, one of the oldest yards in Venice still building and repairing gondolas.

The chalet look is no accident. Many of the craftsmen who worked in the squeri, and the timber they worked with, came down from the mountains of Cadore, and they built their workshops the way they built at home. The yard goes back to the seventeenth century, and it is still a working place, not a museum, so admire it from this side of the canal and let the craftsmen get on with it.

A gondola is a small miracle. It is around eleven metres long, assembled from roughly two hundred and eighty pieces of wood of eight different kinds, oak, elm, larch, lime, fir and others, and it is deliberately lopsided. The left side is wider than the right by about twenty-four centimetres, so that the boat runs straight even though the gondolier rows on one side only. Watch one from behind and you will see it lean, as if it were always about to turn.

And why black? The usual story is that the Republic's sumptuary laws of the sixteenth century put an end to the ruinous competition among nobles to own the most gilded, most colourful boat, and black became the rule. In those days there were thousands of gondolas on the canals. Today there are only a few hundred, and just a handful of squeri still know how to build one from scratch.

Beside you stands the church of San Trovaso, with two almost identical façades. The story goes that this let the two great rival factions of Venice, the Castellani and the Nicolotti, each enter by their own door without meeting. Keep that rivalry in mind. Now head back down to the Zattere and follow the waterfront west for about ten minutes, then turn right along the Rio di San Sebastiano to the church of the same name.
5. San Sebastiano: Veronese's Church

Campo San Sebastiano, Dorsoduro 1687, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

From outside, San Sebastiano is a modest Renaissance church on a quiet canal at the western end of Dorsoduro. Nothing prepares you for what is inside: a building painted almost entirely by one man, ceiling, walls, organ shutters and altar, as if you had stepped inside his head.

The man was Paolo Caliari, called Veronese because he came from Verona. He arrived in Venice young, and one of his first big Venetian commissions, in 1555, was the ceiling of the sacristy here, followed by the ceiling of the nave. The prior of the monastery was a fellow Veronese, and the painter kept coming back, covering the church with colour over the course of roughly a decade.

Look up at the nave ceiling. It tells the story of Esther, the Jewish queen of Persia who saved her people, and Veronese paints it from below, so that you see the horses, the king and the queen in steep perspective, as if they were standing on a balcony just above you. On the walls of the chancel you meet the saint himself, Sebastian, in huge canvases of his trials and martyrdom. The colours are his famous ones: silvery whites, deep greens, the shimmering pink and gold silks of the Venetian aristocracy.

Veronese loved this church so much that he chose to be buried here. He died in 1588, and his tombstone lies near the organ that he himself painted, with his portrait bust above it. In a city full of famous graves there is something moving about a painter resting under his own ceilings, in a church he turned into a single great work.

Before you leave, notice how few people are here. The quiet is part of the gift. Now walk north past the church of the Angelo Raffaele, then follow the calli east until you reach a tall building with a white Baroque front, at the corner of a long, lively campo.
6. Scuola Grande dei Carmini

Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro 2617, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

The building in front of you, with its white stone façade of columns and carved masks, belongs to the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, the confraternity of the Carmelite church next door. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a confraternity like this was a club, a charity and a status symbol all at once, and its members wanted their hall to say so. From the outside it is handsome. Upstairs, it is something else entirely.

The Carmelites spread a devotion to the scapular, two small pieces of brown cloth worn over the shoulders, said to have been given by the Virgin to an English Carmelite, Simon Stock, in a vision. Whoever wore it, the belief went, would be protected in the hour of death. The confraternity that kept this devotion grew rich enough to rebuild its headquarters in the second half of the seventeenth century, with a façade usually attributed to Baldassare Longhena.

Then, in the 1740s, the brothers hired the most fashionable painter in Europe, Giambattista Tiepolo, to decorate the ceiling of the upper hall. In the central canvas the Virgin appears to Simon Stock and hands him the scapular, carried by angels against a sky of pale gold, with figures tumbling at the edges as if they might fall into the room. Climb the grand staircase, under its stucco cherubs and garlands, and see it for yourself.

What makes the Carmini special is that it still feels lived in. Many Venetian confraternities were dissolved in Napoleon's time and their treasures scattered across museums and sales rooms. The Carmini kept its building and its decoration together, and an archconfraternity still looks after it today. You are not visiting a gallery, but the meeting rooms of a brotherhood almost three and a half centuries old in this place.

Step out of the door and turn the corner. In front of you opens the long, irregular Campo Santa Margherita, the living room of Dorsoduro.
7. Campo Santa Margherita

Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Look down the length of Campo Santa Margherita. It is hardly a square at all, but a long, wobbly, comfortable space, with benches under the trees, students with laptops, old men arguing, and in the morning a fish stall or two. In the middle sits a small, lonely building, like an island in a river of people.

That little building was the guild hall of the varoteri, the furriers, who prepared skins and furs for the wealthy of Venice. It stands on its own because the guilds liked to be seen, and a house in the middle of a campo is about as visible as you can get. Venice ran on its guilds: every trade, from glassblowers to gondola builders, had its own rules, its own saint and its own hall.

At the northern end of the campo, find the stump of a bell tower and the shell of the former church of Santa Margherita, now a lecture hall of the university. Look for the carved dragon near the corner. Margaret of Antioch, the story goes, was swallowed by a dragon and burst out of its belly unharmed thanks to the cross she was holding... which made her the patron saint of women in childbirth.

Since the students of Ca' Foscari and the architecture university moved in, this has become the evening campo of Venice. People spill out of the bars with a spritz, a drink born in this part of Italy, and the noise of voices rises until late. The story goes that it began in the nineteenth century, when Austrian soldiers found the local wine too strong and asked for a splash of water in it. In the morning the campo turns back into a neighbourhood market, with fruit, vegetables and fish from the lagoon.

It is the same campo used in two completely different ways in less than twelve hours, and that is very Venetian. Now walk to the far end, take the bridge over the canal and the short calle beyond it. In two minutes you reach a church with a rough, unfinished brick façade. Do not judge it by the outside.
8. San Pantalon: Fumiani's Ceiling

Campo San Pantalon, Dorsoduro, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Here is another church with a bare brick face, unfinished like so many in Venice, at the edge of a small campo by the canal. Go in, walk to the middle of the nave, and look up. Then try to work out where the building ends and the painting begins.

The ceiling of San Pantalon is one of the largest painted canvas ceilings in the world. Gian Antonio Fumiani worked on it for about twenty-four years, from 1680 to 1704, on dozens of canvases fitted together to cover the whole vault. He painted false architecture, columns, arches and balustrades rising higher and higher, so that the real roof seems to dissolve into a sky full of figures.

The subject is the life and martyrdom of Saint Pantaleon, a doctor from Asia Minor who, the tradition says, treated the poor without payment and was executed under the emperor Diocletian. His patients loved him, the emperors did not. Fumiani shows his glory: the saint carried up into heaven through clouds packed with angels, in a perspective that only truly works from the centre of the nave.

And then the legend. The story goes that when Fumiani finally finished, he stepped back on the scaffolding to admire his work, lost his footing and fell to his death, his masterpiece the last thing he ever saw. It is a wonderful tale and almost certainly untrue, because Fumiani lived on for several more years and died in 1710. But guides have been telling it for generations, and it is far too good to stop now.

Before you leave, look for a quieter treasure in a side chapel: Paolo Veronese's Saint Pantaleon healing a boy, one of the last paintings he made, in 1587. Then step outside and walk east for a couple of minutes, towards the Grand Canal, where a great Gothic palace stands at the bend.
9. Ca' Foscari

Ca' Foscari, Dorsoduro 3246, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Make your way into the courtyard of Ca' Foscari and look back towards the water: tall Gothic windows with pointed arches, stone tracery like lace, carved friezes and the coats of arms of a family that wanted the whole Grand Canal to see it. The palace sits exactly at the bend, the volta de canal, where the view runs both ways, towards Rialto and towards San Marco.

It was built from 1453 for the doge Francesco Foscari, who ruled Venice for thirty-four years, longer than any doge before him. He turned the Republic into a land power on the mainland, and he made this palace a statement: no other house has quite this view. The bend is also the finish of the Historical Regatta every September, and the floating judges' stand, the machina, is moored right in front.

But the Foscari story is a tragedy. His son Jacopo was accused of taking bribes, then of murder, tried, and sent into exile, and he died far away on Crete. The old doge, broken, was forced by the Council of Ten to abdicate in 1457, and he died only days later. Lord Byron turned the story into a play, The Two Foscari, and Giuseppe Verdi into an opera, I due Foscari, in 1844.

In 1574 the young King Henri III of France stayed here on his way home from Poland, and the Republic entertained him so lavishly that, the story goes, at one banquet even the napkins were made of sugar. Since 1868 the palace has housed the university that carries its name, and today students argue about economics under the same ceilings where a king was entertained.

Now head back into the calli, away from the Grand Canal, and walk south to Campo San Barnaba. From the campo follow the canal a few steps west, to a small bridge with white marble footprints set into its top.
10. Ponte dei Pugni & Campo San Barnaba

Ponte dei Pugni, Rio di San Barnaba, Dorsoduro, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Stand at the top of this little bridge and look down at your feet. Set into the stone near each corner are white marble footprints, four of them, two on each side. They are not decoration. They mark where the fighters stood before a battle.

Ponte dei Pugni means the bridge of fists. For centuries Venice was split into two great factions, the Castellani from the eastern part of the city and the Nicolotti from the west, and they settled their rivalry with organised battles on bridges like this one. Back then there were no parapets. The aim was to punch, shove and throw the other side into the canal, while crowds packed the fondamente, the windows and the roofs to cheer.

The fights were a sport, a festival and a pressure valve, and the Republic tolerated them for a long time, even staging them for visiting princes. But they could turn vicious: sticks came out, then knives, and people died. In 1705, after one battle turned especially bloody, the government banned the bridge fights for good.

Two films have left their mark on Campo San Barnaba, just behind you. In Summertime, in 1955, Katharine Hepburn stepped backwards into the canal here while taking a photograph, and she later said the dip left her with an eye infection that troubled her for the rest of her life. And in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the church of San Barnaba became a library with a knight's tomb hidden beneath its floor.

Below the bridge, a barge moored at the fondamenta has long sold fruit and vegetables, one of the last shops floating on the water. Buy a peach if you like. Then walk back past the church of San Barnaba and follow the fondamenta along the canal towards the Grand Canal, where a huge white palace waits for the final stop.
11. Ca' Rezzonico: Museum of 18th-Century Venice

Fondamenta Rezzonico, Dorsoduro 3136, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy

Behind the gate on the Fondamenta Rezzonico rises a white stone giant of a palace, its columns and heavy cornices running straight down into the Grand Canal on the far side. Inside, it holds a whole lost century: the museum of eighteenth-century Venice, the last golden age of the Republic before its fall.

The palace was designed by Baldassare Longhena, the architect of the Salute, for the Bon family in the middle of the seventeenth century. But Longhena died in 1682 and the Bon ran out of money, so for decades the building stood unfinished. In 1751 the Rezzonico, a family of merchants who had bought their way into the Venetian nobility, acquired it and had Giorgio Massari complete it. In 1758 the family celebrated its greatest triumph: Carlo Rezzonico was elected pope, as Clement XIII.

That same year Giambattista Tiepolo painted ceilings here for the wedding of a Rezzonico son, and the great ballroom still dazzles with painted architecture and chandeliers. Upstairs are rooms full of Venetian life from that century: Pietro Longhi's little scenes of ladies, fortune tellers and a rhinoceros on show, and the strange, haunting frescoes of Giandomenico Tiepolo, brought here from his family's villa, full of clowns, the Pulcinellas.

In 1888 the palace was bought by Pen Browning, son of the English poet Robert Browning, and his wealthy American wife. The poet came to stay, and here, in December 1889, he died. A plaque on the side of the palace quotes his own lines about the word Italy engraved inside his heart. Decades later, in the 1920s, the songwriter Cole Porter rented the palace for a time and filled it with legendary parties.

And here the walk ends, in front of a palace that still holds the last party of the Venetian Republic. You began in Peggy Guggenheim's twentieth century and walked backwards through Tiepolo, Veronese and Titian, past the gondola builders and the bridge fighters. Take the vaporetto from the Ca' Rezzonico stop, and let the Grand Canal carry you home.