From the street, the Arsenale gives away very little. A wall. A gate. Water disappearing behind it.
Behind that reticence sat the industrial engine of a maritime empire, and a few minutes’ walk beyond it, the quiet campi where the men who built the ships lived and prayed, beside a church wall that also accepted secret denunciations.
This section of Walk No. 11, the Arsenale Walk in Castello, runs from the gates of the Arsenale to Campo Do Pozzi – POI #3 through to POI #11.
Arriving at Campo de l’Arsenal
Take the north-western exit of Campo San Biagio along Fondamenta de l’Arsenale. Follow the fondamenta for 210 metres until you reach Ponte de l’Arsenal o del Paradiso, and cross it into Campo de l’Arsenal.
In front of you is the forge of Venetian sea power.
An animated production line was created here that could turn out a fighting galley in a single day. King Henry III of France was shown the process when he visited Venice in 1574, arriving as a guest aboard the Bucintoro. Roger Crowley has described the inventory discipline that made it possible: benches and braces by the thousand, some fifteen thousand oars, three hundred sails, a hundred masts, and warehouses of rudders, arms, pitch, cables and ironwork, each item counted, costed and stored in its own place. The ideal was a hundred galleys held dry in reserve.
Depending on the state of war, between two and three thousand workers might be employed here at any one time.
The gates of the Arsenale
The front gates (POI #3) and the sculptures gathered around them are important historical relics in their own right.
The archway of the land entrance was completed around 1460 and is one of the earliest statements of Renaissance architecture in Venice. Look up. Above the arch stands the striding Lion of St Mark – ‘passant’, in the language of heraldry – part of the original fifteenth-century gate. Lepanto came later: after the naval victory of 1571, the gate acquired its winged Victories and its commemorative inscription.
A shipyard gate, doing the work of a triumphal arch.
The lion that came from Piraeus
Among the sculptures, note the Piraeus lion (POI #4).
Francesco Morosini took it as war booty from Piraeus during the Venetian campaign of 1687. It dates from the fourth century BC, which makes it older than almost everything else you will see on this walk by a comfortable margin.
The interest is on its flank. The inscriptions winding across it were cut in the eleventh century by Scandinavian Varangians serving the Byzantine emperor. One of the surviving texts identifies its makers as Swedes.
A Greek lion, marked by northern soldiers, carried home by a Venetian admiral, and now standing guard over a shipyard. Few objects in the city travel quite so far to end up beside a gate.
Campo San Martino and its church
To continue, head west, away from the Arsenale gate. In 60 metres you will reach Campo San Martino and the church of San Martino (POI #5).
The church was established in the tenth century and rebuilt several times. The present building follows a design by Jacopo Sansovino of 1546. The façade was added in 1897.
Inside there is a small altar by Tullio Lombardo, and, of greater interest, the monument to Doge Francesco Erizzo by Mattia Carneri. The memorial has been oriented so that it faces his old palazzo, which can be seen through the door. That is a detail worth standing still for: a funerary monument arranged around a sightline.
Erizzo became Doge while the plague still gripped Venice, an outbreak that carried off nearly a third of the city’s inhabitants, and he served for fifteen years, from 1631 to 1646. The vow was not his. His predecessor Nicolò Contarini and the Senate had already undertaken to build Santa Maria della Salute and to make an annual state pilgrimage there if the city were delivered. In November 1631, during Erizzo’s reign, Venice was declared officially free of the epidemic. The pilgrimage survives, and is made each year on 21 November.
There is more here than the church itself. On the right side of the door is one of the famous bocca di leone (POI #6).
These were the slots through which citizens posted written reports on one another for various transgressions, or, as Hugh Douglas puts it, for ‘secret denunciations of blasphemers and irreverent people’.
A postbox for the state, set beside a church door, in a parish full of shipyard workers.
The building attached to the church is the Scuola di San Martino (POI #7), the guild of the ship caulkers. Above its door is a relief of Saint Martin dividing his cloak to share with a poor man.
The caulkers were among the trades on which the Arsenale depended. Their guild built itself a hall against the flank of their parish church, and put their saint over the door in the act of giving half of what he had.
Traces of the Arsenalotti
Leave on the northern side of the campo, cross Ponte dei Penini and follow Fondamenta dei Penini for 25 metres, at which point it curves to the right. A few metres further along on the left, just after a small bridge, look for traces of the former residences of the Arsenale workers, the Arsenalotti (POI #8).
The evidence is in the inscriptions on Nos. 2445 and 2446.
The old numbering survives too, although the system it belonged to has long since disappeared.
Campo Do Pozzi
Continue another 20 metres and turn left into Calle del Bastion. Follow the calle for 80 metres and you will reach Campo Do Pozzi. The calle changes name to Calle de le Muneghete after 40 metres, which is normal here and not a sign that you have gone wrong.
Two buildings are marked in the campo and its approach (POI #10 and POI #11). At No. 2611 there is a Gothic palazzo. At Nos. 2684–2689 is the sixteenth-century Palazzo Malipiero.
The campo is named for having two wells. One remains.
Walking context
This article covers the early section of Walk No. 11, the Arsenale Walk in Castello.
The walk starts and finishes in the same place, on the Riva degli Schiavoni near number 4123, and reaches this slice by way of Campo San Biagio, with the church of San Biagio (POI #1) and the Naval Museum (POI #2). From Campo Do Pozzi the route heads west out of the campo along Calle del Mandolin towards POI #12, a view of one of the largest private gardens in the city, seen through an aperture in the gate behind the church of San Giovanni di Malta. Beyond that it continues to Campo de le Gate, San Francesco della Vigna and, later, the Carpaccio cycle in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni.
The neighbouring walk is the Vivaldi Walk, Walk No. 9, also in Castello. It ends on the Riva degli Schiavoni at the Hotel Danieli, a few hundred metres west of where this walk begins, so the two can be joined on foot without any change of transport.
The full route can be followed on the Castello walking map.
Practical visitor notes
The Arsenale gates and the lions before them are viewed from Campo de l’Arsenal, in the open air. They can be examined at length from the campo.
Opening hours for the church of San Martino are not given in the source, so treat the interior as a possibility rather than a plan. The bocca di leone, the relief of Saint Martin and the campo itself are there whether the doors are open or not.
From Ponte dei Penini onwards, this is a residential quarter. Campo Do Pozzi and the fondamente around it are places where people live rather than places arranged for visitors. Keep voices low, keep out of doorways, and give way on the narrow stretches.
The house-number inscriptions at Nos. 2445 and 2446 reward a slow pass and good light.
Continue exploring
This is one section of the wider Arsenale Walk, which is set out in full in 17 Walks in Venice along with the Carpaccio paintings and the churches that follow later in the route. The Vivaldi Walk, Walk No. 9, picks up where this one leaves the Riva degli Schiavoni, and it is also the walk that takes in San Giorgio dei Greci, the church the Greek community moved to in 1511 after leaving San Biagio at the start of this route.
The Arsenalotti turn up elsewhere in the city too. The Fabric of Venice notes that from 1569 the Arsenale workers stood ceremonial guard at Sansovino’s Loggetta at the base of the campanile in Piazza San Marco, watching over the assembled patricians. The men who built the fleet were trusted with the Republic’s front room.
Image of the church of San Martino by Sailko; image of the Bocca dei Leone by Didier Descouens. Both on Wikimedia Commons.