Riva degli Schiavoni Site Features

The promenade offers an open, uninterrupted stretch of waterfront rare in central Venice, with wide views across St. Mark's Basin to San Giorgio Maggiore. Along its length, look for the Hotel Danieli, Santa Maria della Pietà (Vivaldi's own church), and the 1887 monument to Victor Emmanuel II -- as well as the busy vaporetto stops and gondola moorings that make it one of the city's main transit points as well as a destination in itself.

The riva runs roughly 850 metres along St Mark's Basin from the Doge's Palace east toward the Arsenale -- the longest continuous open waterfront in central Venice.

Almost none of it is natural ground. The shore was built up from the 9th century, extended by reclaiming marsh in 1060, first paved in terracotta in 1324, and widened into its present form only in 1780-82. What looks like the city's front is a piece of 18th-century civil engineering laid over eight centuries of landfill.

Its width is what makes it work. Venice is a city of one-person calli; the riva is wide enough for crowds, vaporetto queues, gondola moorings and people simply standing to look, all at once, which is why every visitor ends up on it.

The view is south across open water to San Giorgio Maggiore, with the Giudecca to the right and the lagoon opening to the left -- the widest prospect available from anywhere in the historic centre on foot.

One curious consequence of an assassination attempt on Doge Vitale II Michiel here in 1172: Venice banned stone construction on the attacker's site in retaliation, and the ban held until 1948.