“Detourism: La newsletter di Venezia”, the official Town of Venice Tourism Office Newsletter, takes us to discover how to find your way in Venice! Our suggestion is to always take a Su e Zo official map with you in the first place! Enjoy your reading!

Venetian curiosities: finding your way in Venice

Venice street signs are unique. Unlike in any other city, the names of the streets, alleys, and squares in Venice are written directly on the walls of buildings. By looking around a square, for example, you could see a number of signs stenciled onto whitewashed rectangles, called nizioleti, which in Venetian dialect literally means “little sheets”. Besides the names of streets, bridges, squares and canals, the nizioleti also tell you the six districts in which Venice is split: Castello, Cannaregio, San Marco, Dorsoduro, San Polo and Santa Croce.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, Venice street names were not fixed by the Venetian Republic: they owed their origin to oral tradition. Only during the nineteenth century, house numbers and place names were clearly written on the walls of the city. Many of the streets were named after saints (Campo San Polo, Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Campo Santa Margherita); crafts (Calle dei Fabri, Ruga dei Spezieri, Calle dei Saoneri); merchants or goods (Calle del Forno, Calle del Frutariol, Riva del Vin). Besides, you can also see how the nizioleti record the names of the noble families who ruled Venice (Contarini, Mocenigo, Zane, Albrizzi, etc.), or the presence of communities of foreigners in the lagoon. Good examples include Calle dei Albanesi, dei Greci, dei Tedeschi and dei Turchi. Also, many places in Venice took their names from historical facts or even from legendary events.

Find out more about some of the most curious Venetian nizioleti and their history. You can find some helpful street terminology in this small glossary of Venetian most used terms.

Venice street names
on Google Arts & Culture

[source: La newsletter di Venezia, n. 18/2020 del 22.05.2020]
[picture: TGS Eurogroup]

We are proud to publish some selected contents of such newsletter (see previous post: “Detourism for the Up and Down the Bridges“). On our website, in several episodes, we will only present some samples (see all posts in our archive page “Detourism Newsletter“), but the invitation addressed to all the friends of the Up and Down the Bridges is to subscribe to the newsletter directly.
Special thanks to the Councillor for Tourism for having enthusiastically welcomed this new important collaboration between TGS Eurogroup and the Tourism Office of the Town of Venice and for giving us the precious opportunity to publish on the pages of this blog some extracts from this newsletter, both in Italian and in English.

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