Walking around Venice, there are a number of different
symbols like the winged lions or the gondolas that tell you a bit about the
city and its past. But what most people will probably miss are the street
names! You’re probably thinking, street names are just street names – what more
can there be? Except, that’s not the case in Venice!
Back in the 19th Century, a train station was
built and slowly, visitors stopped coming with their boats. This resulted in some
canals being filled to make room for
more pathways and now they are marked with street names that represent its past.
For example, “Salizzada” means ‘paved’ and it marks the earliest canals that were
filled in with more expensive gray stones called ‘Trachyte’, differing to later
canals that were packed with earth.
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| Credits: Travel Adventure |
There are a number of other streets that are named this way. Some of these street names give you a glimpse of what the space was previously used for:
- “Ramo” – refers to an alleyway that was only used to access homes whose main entrances were canals. Nowadays, people tend to know them as a branch of a street
- “Fondamenta” – translates into ‘foundation’. These pathways were designed to help reinforce banks or form the foundations of the buildings beside them
- “Campo” – denotes an area that used to be a large square of a field. Similarly, the smaller fields were given names that had “Campiello” in them. Both of these originated the word “Campi” which means field or meadow!
These everyday street signs appear to be so ordinary but they indicate what used to be – that is why I love exploring symbols like these! It makes me wonder what else has been named based on its past use or history.
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