Museum of Naval History & Arsenal Site Features

The Arsenale is a fortified enclosure rather than a building: roughly 45 hectares of basins, docks, rope-walks and workshops behind a continuous crenellated brick wall, with towers at the water entrance. From outside almost nothing of it is visible, which was the point.

The Porta Magna of 1460, attributed to Antonio Gambello and probably modelled on a Roman arch at Pola, is generally counted the first Renaissance building in Venice -- classical columns and entablature at a moment when the rest of the city was still building Gothic. The winged lion of St Mark above the doorway holds a closed book, unusually, rather than the customary open one.

Inside, the surviving industrial fabric is the more remarkable part. The Corderie della Tana is a rope-walk over 300 metres long, rebuilt by Antonio da Ponte in 1579, its length dictated purely by the length of cable a warship needed. The Gaggiandre, two covered wet docks attributed to a design by Jacopo Sansovino, are vaulted stone halls open to the water at one end so that hulls could be worked on afloat and under cover.

The Bucintoro

The museum's largest model reconstructs the doge's state barge, a gilded ceremonial galley used once a year for the Sposalizio del Mare, the ritual marriage of Venice to the sea. The last of them was stripped and burned by Napoleon's troops in 1798, so no original survives.

The Padiglione delle Navi

A separate pavilion in a restored 16th-century oar workshop nearby holds full-size vessels rather than models -- ceremonial craft, working lagoon boats, and 20th-century naval hardware including a manned torpedo of the type used by Italian naval raiders in the Second World War.

The Piraeus lion

Of the lions outside the Porta Magna, the largest was taken from the harbour at Piraeus in 1687. Its flank carries a long band of runic inscription, cut by Varangian mercenaries serving Byzantium in the 11th century and unreadable until the 19th -- an object that has been a spoil of war twice over.

The Arsenale occupies the whole eastern end of Castello, far enough from San Marco that most visitors never reach it -- a district of long brick walls, wide quiet fondamente and comparatively little through traffic.

Its water entrance opens onto the Bacino di San Marco through a narrow guarded channel between two towers, the only way ships could enter or leave. That single controlled opening is why the yard could keep its methods secret for so long, and it is still the most legible thing about the complex from a passing vaporetto.

The surrounding neighbourhood was built for the workforce: dense terraces of low housing laid out for the arsenalotti, still residential today, and adjoining the Giardini where the Biennale pavilions stand. During Biennale years parts of the Corderie and the Gaggiandre open as exhibition halls, which remains the most reliable way to get inside the walls.