Dorsoduro Travel Guide

There were not many places among the lagoon's mudbanks where Venice's early settlers could be confident that their dwellings wouldn't slither down into the water, but with Dorsoduro they were on relatively solid ground: the sestiere's name translates as "hard back", and its buildings occupy the largest area of firm silt in the centre of the city. Some of the finest minor domestic architecture in Venice is concentrated here, and in recent years many of the area's best houses have been bought up by industrialists and financiers from elsewhere in northern Italy, investing in permanent homes or merely weekend havens from their places of work. The top-bracket colony is, however, pretty well confined to a triangle defined by the Accademia, the Punta della Dogana and the Gesuati. Stroll up to the area around Campo Santa Margherita and the atmosphere is quite different, in part because of the proximity of the university.

During the day at least, it's the paintings of Dorsoduro's art galleries and religious institutions that draw most visitors across the Ponte dell' Accademia. The Gallerie dell'Accademia , replete with masterpieces from each phase in the history of Venetian painting up to the eighteenth century, is the area's essential port of call, and figures on most itineraries as the place to make for when the Piazza's sights have been done. The huge church of Santa Maria della Salute , the grandest gesture of Venetian Baroque and a prime landmark when looking across the water from the Molo, is architecturally the major religious building of the district - but in terms of artistic contents it takes second place to San Sebastiano , the parish church of Paolo Veronese , whose paintings clad much of its interior. Giambattista Tiepolo , the master colourist of a later era, is well represented at the Scuola Grande dei Carmini , and for an overall view of Tiepolo's cultural milieu there's the Ca' Rezzonico , home of Venice's museum of eighteenth-century art and artefacts. Unusually for Venice, art of the twentieth century is also in evidence - at the Guggenheim Collection , which is small yet markedly superior to the city's (frequently closed) public collection of modern art in the Ca' Pésaro. And yet despite all these attractions the district as a whole is remarkably quiet - most tourists step across the Accademia bridge, whirl through the gallery, then cross back over the Canal Grande again.

As with San Polo, the area designated by the section title is slightly more extensive than the sestiere of the same name, since in order to simplify the scheme of the city it incorporates a portion of the Santa Croce sestiere - for the visitor, the most arbitrary and confusing of Venice's divisions. For our purposes Dorsoduro stretches from the Punta della Dogana and the Salute west to the docks of the Stazione Maríttima, and north to Piazzale Roma (which is technically in Santa Croce)