Rialto Market Site Features

The market is not one building but a zoned quarter, and the zoning is the architecture. After the fire of 1514 the whole district was rebuilt to a plan that gave each trade its own porticoed run, and the lane names still record it: Naranzeria for oranges, Speziali for spices, Casaria for cheese, Erberia for greens. The porticoes were the market floor -- covered, continuous, and open to the canal at one end.

The Fabbriche Vecchie along the Ruga degli Orefici are Scarpagnino's, built immediately after the fire: plain, repetitive, arcaded ranges designed as commercial infrastructure rather than display. Sansovino's Fabbriche Nove of 1554-56, running along the Grand Canal, do the same job with a heavier classical hand and a longer frontage.

The Pescheria is the youngest and the most theatrical. Domenico Rupolo built it in 1907 with the painter Cesare Laurenti, and it is deliberately not of its date: a two-storey open loggia of pointed arches, brick and Istrian stone, with carved capitals of fish and fishermen, put up in a Neo-Gothic idiom meant to look four hundred years older than it is. It is a twentieth-century building pretending to be medieval, and it works because the trade inside it genuinely is.

Everything here is open on at least two sides. There are no doors, no windows and no heating anywhere in the market -- it is a set of roofs on columns, which is why it empties so completely at closing time.

The Pescheria's Neo-Gothic loggia is worth a look even without buying anything: pointed arches open directly onto the Grand Canal, framing stalls piled with the lagoon's own seafood -- moeche (soft-shell crabs), scampi, and cuttlefish alongside the usual range of Mediterranean fish. The Erberia next door fills with fruit and vegetable stalls each morning, and by early afternoon both sections have packed up entirely.

The market occupies the San Polo bank of the Grand Canal at its sharpest bend, immediately north-west of the Rialto Bridge -- the point where the canal narrows and every boat in the city has to pass.

That is why it is here. Rialto was the first firm ground settled in the lagoon's centre and the only place goods arriving by water could be unloaded, weighed, taxed and sold without a second transfer. The market did not choose a picturesque spot; the spot produced the market, and then the city grew around it.

The Pescheria faces directly onto the water with no fondamenta in front of it, so fish still arrives by boat at the steps and is carried into the loggia by hand -- a working waterfront rather than a decorative one.

Behind the stalls the district turns immediately into a dense knot of narrow calli, bacari and warehouses, with the Campo San Giacomo di Rialto and its church -- traditionally called the oldest in Venice -- at the centre. The whole quarter is small enough to cross in four minutes and confusing enough to take twenty.