Fish, Wine and Cicchetti: Venice's Rialto Markets and the Bacari of San Polo

A food lover's walk through Venice, from the Rialto fish market and the city's oldest church to standing-room wine bars, baccalà, sarde in saor, spritz and the gondola ferry home

Venice · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Campo Sant'Aponal: A Shipwreck and the Birth of Baccalà

Campo Sant'Aponal, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy

Start in a small, irregular campo with a well-head in the middle and a church whose plain brick front carries a Gothic relief of the Crucifixion. People cut through it all morning on their way to the Rialto market with empty shopping bags, and come back with full ones.

The church is Sant'Apollinare, shortened by Venetians to Sant'Aponal. Venetian tradition says that in 1177 Pope Alexander the Third, fleeing the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, spent a night in disguise under a passage nearby, and a small inscription in the alley still remembers him. Whether he really slept on a doorstep, the story says something true: this has always been a neighbourhood where strangers find a place.

It is also the right moment to talk about the most Venetian thing you will eat today, which, strangely, comes from the Arctic. In the winter of 1431 a Venetian merchant captain, Pietro Querini, was wrecked in a storm in the Atlantic, and the survivors drifted to the island of Røst, in Norway's Lofoten islands. The fishermen there fed them cod, dried by the wind until it was as hard as wood. The story goes that Querini brought this stockfish home, and Venice never looked back.

Venetians call it baccalà, though elsewhere in Italy that word means salted cod. Here it is the air-dried stockfish, soaked for days, poached, then beaten slowly with olive oil until it becomes a white, airy cream: baccalà mantecato. Spread on grilled polenta or a slice of bread, it is the classic cicchetto of every Venetian bar, and on the lean days of Lent it was once almost obligatory.

Watch for it in the glass counters along this walk, and notice how locals eat it: standing, quickly, with a small glass of wine. Now take the Ruga Vecchia San Giovanni, the busy lane heading north-east, toward the Rialto, the oldest commercial heart of the city.
2. San Giacomo di Rialto and the Hunchback of the Market

Campo San Giacomo di Rialto, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy

Stop in the busy little square in front of a tiny church with a Gothic wooden porch and a big clock face on its front. Arcades of shops run all around you, and the crowd coming down off the bridge flows past without a glance. This is San Giacomo di Rialto, which Venetians fondly call San Giacometo, little Saint James.

Legend says it was founded in 421, on the very day Venice itself was born, which would make it the oldest church in the city. The building you see was largely rebuilt around 1600, but it kept its old plan and its porch. Walk round to the back and look at the apse: a Latin inscription carved there tells the merchants of Rialto, more or less, to keep their law fair, their weights true and their contracts honest. A sermon in stone, aimed straight at the market.

This square was a trading floor of the whole Mediterranean. Bankers sat under the arcades with their ledgers open, and from the late 1500s the Republic's public bank worked here. In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, people keep asking what news there is on the Rialto, because whatever happened at sea, in Constantinople or Alexandria, you heard it here first. The street running back toward the bridge is the Ruga degli Oresi, the goldsmiths' street, rebuilt after a fire in 1514 destroyed almost the whole market.

Across the square, find a stooping stone man crouched under a little staircase that leads up to a granite column. He is the Gobbo di Rialto, the hunchback of Rialto, carved in 1541 by Pietro da Salò. From that column officials read out the laws of the Republic. And tradition says that petty thieves, sentenced to run naked from Saint Mark's to Rialto while the crowd beat them, ended their ordeal here, collapsing to kiss the hunchback.

It is said that anonymous verses mocking the powerful were stuck on him in the night, just as on his famous cousin Pasquino in Rome. Now step out toward the Grand Canal, past the stalls of fruit and vegetables, and follow the market along the water to a great hall of open arches.
3. The Pescaria and the Erberia: Venice's Fish and Vegetable Market

Campo de la Pescaria, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy

Walk into the open hall with its tall Gothic arches and take a deep breath of the sea. The stone under your feet is wet, and on the counters lie the shining creatures of the lagoon and the Adriatic: silver sardines, inky cuttlefish, spider crabs, little grey shrimp still twitching. Along the water behind you stretch the green stalls of the Erberia, the fruit and vegetable market.

Fish has been sold on this spot since the Middle Ages, but the hall itself, the Pescaria, only looks medieval. It was built in 1907, designed by Domenico Rupolo with the painter Cesare Laurenti, in a romantic neo-Gothic style. Look at the capitals of the columns: they are carved with fish, crabs, boats and fishermen... a cathedral where the saints have fins. Somewhere among the stalls an old marble plaque sets out the minimum size each kind of fish had to reach before it could be sold.

Watch what the Venetians buy, because it follows the seasons like a calendar. In spring and autumn come the moeche, small green crabs caught in the brief moment when they shed their shells, fried whole and eaten in one bite. In spring the Erberia fills with castraure, the tender first artichokes from the island of Sant'Erasmo, cut early so that the plant will grow more.

And there are always sardines, for the most Venetian recipe of them all: sarde in saor. The fish are fried, then layered with onions cooked slowly in vinegar, often with raisins and pine nuts, and left to rest for a day or two. It was sailors' food, made to keep on long voyages, and the onions were said to help against scurvy. On the night of the Redentore festival in July, families still eat it on boats while they wait for the fireworks.

The market's real enemy is not time but emptiness: in 2022 the population of the historic centre fell below fifty thousand, and every stall that closes is a sign of it. So buy something, even just an apple. Then walk inland along the Ruga dei Spezieri, the old street of the spice sellers, and find the narrow Calle dei Do Mori, where a doorway has been pouring wine, they say, for more than five centuries.
4. Cantina Do Mori: Ombra and Cicchetti at the Counter

Calle dei Do Mori, San Polo 429, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy

Find a narrow alley and a low doorway, and step into a dark, wood-lined room where copper pots hang from the ceiling and there are no chairs at all. People drink standing at the long counter, shoulder to shoulder, a small glass of wine in one hand and something on a toothpick in the other.

This is the Cantina Do Mori, and tradition says it has been serving wine since 1462, which would make it one of the oldest bars in Venice. Nobody can show you the first receipt, but the room feels old enough to believe it, and tradition even places Giacomo Casanova among its customers. The name means the two Moors, and as with so much in Venice, nobody quite agrees which two.

This is a bacaro, the Venetian wine bar, and the rules are simple. You order an ombra, a small glass of wine, and ombra means shade. Legend says the wine sellers in Saint Mark's Square used to move their stalls through the day to stay in the shadow of the bell tower, so going for a shade came to mean going for a glass.

With the wine come the cicchetti, little bites laid out on the counter like jewels in a shop window. Bread with baccalà, folded slices of mortadella, half an egg with an anchovy, meatballs called polpette fried while you wait, a rolled sardine. You eat one or two, you pay, you move on. A Venetian evening is not one long dinner but a giro d'ombre, a slow wander from bar to bar, with a glass and a bite in each.

The secret is the pace: never sit, never stay too long, and always greet the person behind the counter. Do that twice and you will be treated like a regular. Then come back out and head west through the calli and over a small bridge to Campo San Cassiano, where Venice invented a new way to spend an evening.
5. Campo San Cassiano: Opera, Courtesans and the Malvasie

Campo San Cassiano, San Polo, 30125 Venezia VE, Italy

You have come into a quiet campo beside a canal, with a squat church and a bell tower that looks older than everything around it. Nothing here tells you that this little square once changed the history of music.

In 1637, in a theatre owned by the Tron family here in the parish of San Cassiano, an opera was performed for a paying public for the first time in history. Until then opera had been a luxury of princes, staged in palaces for invited guests. Here anyone with the price of a ticket could walk in. Within a few decades Venice had a whole string of opera houses, and an evening at the theatre became as Venetian as a glass of wine.

If the church is open, look for a dramatic Crucifixion by Tintoretto, painted in 1568, with ladders leaning against the crosses like workmen on a building site. It is one of his strangest and most human scenes, a crowd going about its business at the foot of a tragedy.

Just a few steps away lies the old district of the Carampane, which the Republic set aside for its prostitutes. A little bridge nearby is still called the Ponte de le Tette, the Bridge of Breasts, and legend says the women were encouraged to show themselves bare-breasted at the windows above it to tempt passing men. Whether that was ever a real rule is doubtful, but the name has survived every attempt to make it respectable.

Old Venice also had its own wine shops for the night, the malvasie, named after the sweet Malvasia wine shipped from the Greek port of Monemvasia. Several alleys in the city are still called Calle de la Malvasia. Opera, wine, courtesans... Venetians always knew how to fill an evening. Now walk west over the next bridge to a small square that has hardly changed in five hundred years.
6. Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini: Wells, Patere and Risi e Bisi

Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini, Santa Croce, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy

Enter a small, perfectly enclosed campo ringed by houses with Gothic windows, a stone well-head in the middle and, set into the walls, round carved medallions of birds and beasts. If you want to know what a Venetian square looked like in the Middle Ages, this is about as close as you can get.

Those round medallions are called patere, Byzantine-style reliefs that Venetians set into their façades for decoration and, some say, for good luck. The well-head is not really a well at all: Venice has no fresh springs. Under a campo like this lies a cistern, where rainwater from the roofs ran through layers of sand to be filtered and stored, and the well was where families came, bucket in hand, to draw it.

Since we are walking through food, let us talk about the dish that once opened the spring at the very top of Venetian society: risi e bisi, rice and peas. On the feast of Saint Mark, the twenty-fifth of April, the doge was served it with the first fresh peas from the lagoon gardens. It is neither soup nor risotto but something in between, often cooked with a broth made from the pea pods themselves, so that it tastes intensely green.

There was a political taste to it too. The doge eating the peas of the lagoon was a reminder that the Republic could feed itself from its own islands and gardens, even while its ships were bringing pepper, sugar and silk from the other end of the known world. Simple ingredients, cooked at exactly the right moment of the year: that is the whole philosophy of Venetian cooking.

Take a moment by the well-head. Early in the morning this campo belongs only to the people who live around it, and you can hear a radio through an open window and a cat on a sill. Then leave by the northern side and walk toward the Grand Canal, where a white Baroque church looks out across the water.
7. San Stae: Gold-Beaters, Sugar and Carnival Fritole

Campo San Stae, Santa Croce, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy

Come out on the Grand Canal in front of a dazzling white Baroque façade, crowded with statues and crowned by a pediment, looking straight out at the water. Beside it, a much smaller building carries a little inscription over its door. Boats pass, the vaporetto stop knocks against its posts, and the whole scene feels like a stage set.

San Stae is the Venetian name for Saint Eustace, and the façade was built in the early 1700s by Domenico Rossi. The small house next door belonged to the guild of the battiloro, the gold-beaters, who hammered gold into leaves thinner than paper: the gold that covered the picture frames, ceilings and altars of the whole city.

Gold of another kind once passed along this canal: sugar. In the Middle Ages Venice was one of Europe's great sugar traders, bringing cane sugar from Cyprus and Crete and refining it in the city. The story goes that when King Henri the Third of France was feasted here in 1574, even the napkins, plates and bread on his table were sculpted from sugar, and he only discovered the trick when a napkin broke in his hands.

That sweet tooth never left. During Carnival every bakery fills with fritole, small doughnuts studded with raisins and pine nuts, and with galani, thin crisp ribbons of fried dough dusted with sugar. The fritter makers once had their own guild, and they fried in the open street in great pans. And all year there are zaeti, yellow cornmeal biscuits with raisins, named after zalo, the Venetian word for yellow, perfect for dipping in a glass of sweet wine.

Just along the canal stands a great dark palace of heavy rusticated stone, Ca' Pesaro, built to designs by Baldassare Longhena and now a museum of modern art. Then walk on, west through the alleys behind the canal, to a long white arcaded palace that once housed the merchants of the Ottoman Empire.
8. Fondaco dei Turchi: Spices, Coffee and the Ottoman Merchants

Salizada del Fontego dei Turchi, Santa Croce 1730, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy

Stand beside a long white palace whose canal front is a double row of round arches on slender columns, with a squat tower at each end topped by little battlements. The best view is from a passing boat, but even from the side it looks like something out of a Byzantine mosaic come to life... and in a way it is.

This is the Fondaco dei Turchi, one of the oldest palaces on the Grand Canal, built in the thirteenth century for a wealthy family. It passed through many hands, and in 1621 the Republic turned it into the headquarters of the Ottoman merchants: warehouses, lodgings and a place of prayer under one roof, with windows partly walled up so the merchants could live by their own customs. They stayed until 1838.

Think about what moved through these doors: pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, silk, carpets and wax. For centuries Venice was the spice market of Europe, and spices are still hiding in its cooking. The sweet and sour of saor, with its raisins and pine nuts, the cinnamon in old festival sweets, the habit of adding sugar to savoury dishes: all of it tastes of the eastern trade.

Coffee came the same way. Venetians learned it from the Ottomans, and in 1683 the first coffee house in the city opened under the arcades of Saint Mark's Square. Within a century there were dozens of them, and Venetians were arguing, gossiping and plotting over little cups exactly as the merchants of Istanbul did.

In the nineteenth century the half-ruined palace was rebuilt so thoroughly that critics accused the restorers of inventing a new building. Since 1923 it has been Venice's Natural History Museum, home to the skeleton of an Ouranosaurus, a dinosaur found in the Sahara. Now walk inland, to the south, to a wide and leafy campo where the neighbourhood gathers in the evening.
9. Campo San Giacomo dall'Orio: Where the Spritz Begins

Campo San Giacomo dall'Orio, Santa Croce, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy

Walk into one of the largest and most lived-in squares in Venice: trees, benches, children on scooters, old men on folding chairs, a dog asleep in the sun, and in the middle an ancient church that seems to have grown out of the ground rather than been built. The campo has no grand view at all, and that is its gift.

The church is San Giacomo dall'Orio, and nobody is quite sure what the name means. Some say it comes from a laurel tree, lauro, that once grew here; others from an old word for firm, dry ground in the marsh. Inside, look up: the wooden ceiling is shaped like the upturned hull of a ship, made by craftsmen who knew how to build boats. And look for a column of polished green marble, said to have come, like so much in Venice, from Constantinople.

This is the perfect place to talk about the drink in everybody's hand at six o'clock: the spritz. The usual story begins in the nineteenth century, when Venice was ruled by Austria. Soldiers and officials from the north found the local wines too strong, and asked for a splash of water in them... spritzen, in German, means to spray. A glass of white wine lightened with water: that was the first spritz.

Then came soda water, and in the twentieth century the bitter liqueurs that turned it orange and red: Aperol, created in Padua in 1919, and Select, born in Venice in 1920, the bitter many Venetian bars still prefer. Order a spritz in a bacaro and you may be asked which bitter you want, and a green olive on a stick is the traditional finishing touch.

In the evening this campo is where Santa Croce gathers: kids playing football against the church walls, parents with a spritz keeping half an eye on them. Sit down for a while; nobody will hurry you. Then take the alleys north toward the Grand Canal again, to a waterfront with one of the darkest legends in the city.
10. Riva de Biasio: The Butcher's Legend and Fegato alla Veneziana

Riva de Biasio, Santa Croce, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy

Come out on a stretch of waterfront along the Grand Canal, with a vaporetto stop, a row of plain houses and a wide view across the water to the church of San Marcuola. It looks completely innocent. Venetians, though, will tell you a story about this name that may put you off sausages for a day.

Legend says that in the sixteenth century a man called Biasio kept a shop here as a luganegher, a sausage maker. His sguazeto, a rich meat stew, was famous across the city, until one day a customer found something in his bowl that should not have been there... a child's finger. Biasio, the story goes, had been putting stolen children into his stew. He was executed, his shop destroyed, and the waterfront has carried his name ever since.

No reliable record proves any of it, and historians suspect a dark fairy tale, perhaps grown out of some real crime. But it tells you how much a Venetian neighbourhood depended on trusting its butchers and cooks. And the old word survives: luganega is still the name of a long, thin sausage in the Veneto.

So let us talk instead about Venice's favourite meat dish, fegato alla veneziana: calf's liver cut into thin strips and cooked quickly with a mountain of onions softened slowly until sweet. The idea of sweetness and liver is ancient. The Italian word for liver, fegato, comes from the Latin ficatum, the liver of animals fattened on figs. The Venetians swapped the figs for onions and kept the sweetness.

Served with soft white polenta, it is the taste of the Venetian home kitchen rather than the restaurant. Now walk west along the waterfront and cross the Grand Canal on the Ponte degli Scalzi by the railway station, turn right along the busy Lista di Spagna, cross the Ponte delle Guglie with its little stone spires, and you will reach the street where Cannaregio does its shopping.
11. Rio Terà San Leonardo: Cannaregio's Everyday Market

Rio Terà San Leonardo, Cannaregio, 30121 Venezia VE, Italy

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.
12. Campo Santa Sofia and the Traghetto to the Pescaria

Campo Santa Sofia, Cannaregio, 30121 Venezia VE, Italy

Walk to the end of the campo, to the wooden landing at the water's edge, and look across the Grand Canal. Facing you on the other bank are the Gothic arches of the Pescaria and the stalls where this walk began. Between the two banks a gondola waits, rowed by two gondoliers: the traghetto.

The traghetto is a gondola ferry, and for centuries it was how Venetians crossed the Grand Canal, which until the 1850s had only one bridge, the Rialto. There were once dozens of traghetto crossings; today only a handful survive. The custom is to stand for the short ride, a small balancing act that tells everyone you are a local, or trying very hard to look like one.

The Strada Nova you have just walked was cut through the old houses around 1870, after Venice joined Italy, to give the city a straight route from the station to the Rialto. And in the bars on this side of the canal you will find the last Venetian institution of the walk: the tramezzino, a soft triangle of white bread stuffed so generously that it bulges. The word is usually credited to the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who wanted an Italian name instead of sandwich; Venice took the idea and made it fat.

In one walk you have tasted, at least in your imagination, the whole history of this city: Arctic stockfish from a shipwreck, spices from the Ottoman merchants, sugar from Cyprus, maize from the Americas, a splash of water from the Austrians. Venetian food is a map of where Venetian ships went... a trading empire you can eat.

If the traghetto is running, cross standing up, the way Venetians have for centuries, and land at the Pescaria where the morning began. If not, the Strada Nova will lead you back toward the Rialto in a few minutes. Either way, end the walk the Venetian way: one more ombra, one more cicchetto, standing at a counter. Cin cin.