A parish can lend its name to a whole class of people and this one did.

The Barnabotti were patricians without money. They were lodged at public expense in the parish of San Barnaba, kept their seats in the Great Council, and used them to give voice to the restless and the discontented. Rank without means, in a Republic that could not quite bring itself to let them go.

This article covers the opening stretch of Walk No. 13, the Barnabotti Walk, in Dorsoduro – from the Ca’ Rezzonico vaporetto stop to Ponte dei Pugni, by way of a thousand-year-old well, a museum of the eighteenth century, and a campo that has twice found its way onto film.

Palazzo Stern and the old well

Step off at the Ca’ Rezzonico stop and the first two points of interest sit on either side of you. Take them in whichever order suits.

To one side is the small courtyard in front of Palazzo Stern, POI #1. In it stands a vera da pozzo, a wellhead, believed to be around a thousand years old.

It is worth pausing over. Wellheads were the centre of neighbourhood life for centuries, the place where water was drawn each day and where people gathered, talked, argued and waited their turn. Look closely at the stone and the fittings. Many wells in the city still keep their steel lid, the remains of a pumping system, a nozzle and a hook for the bucket, and a recess carved into the plinth for a dog to drink from.

A thousand years of that, before the walk has properly begun.

Ca’ Rezzonico, finished by its second family

On the other side of the vaporetto stop is Ca’ Rezzonico, POI #2, home of the Museum of 18th-century Venice. If you have time on this walk to give to one building, give it to this one.

The palazzo took the better part of a century to finish, and it passed to a second family before the work was done. Baldassare Longhena, architect of the Salute on Walk No. 12, drew the original design for the Bon family around 1667. Longhena died in 1682. The Bon fortunes ran short, the money stopped, and the building stood unfinished.

The hiatus ended in 1750, when Giambattista Rezzonico bought the incomplete palace and commissioned Giorgio Massari to finish it. It was completed in 1758.

Under the Rezzonico it filled with artworks and furnishings. The family died out without an heir and gave the palazzo up, and it passed through several hands over the following decades. The poet Robert Browning died here in 1889. Cole Porter rented the place from 1926 to 1927. The city bought it in 1935 to house its collections of eighteenth-century art.

Before you go in, stand back and look at the façade. The interest is in the interplay of the architectural elements and the effect they create together.

Inside the Museum of 18th-century Venice

The collection has been assembled from frescoes stripped out of other palazzi in the city, along with their ceiling canvases. The result is an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo furnished with the art of its own century, gathered from across Venice and brought under one roof.

The holdings come from several sources. The Egidio Martini collection covers Venetian artists from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. The Mestrovich collection includes works by Tintoretto, Cima da Conegliano and Guardi.

Start on the first floor, in the ballroom. It is the largest of its kind in Venice, which tells you something about how the wealthy families of the period entertained. Look up for Crosato’s Apollo’s Chariot and the Four Continents. Mengs’s portrait of Carlo Rezzonico hangs in this room – Giambattista’s son, elected Pope Clement XIII.

In the next room, the Sala dell’Allegoria Nuziale, look for Tiepolo’s Nuptial Allegory. There is a Tiepolo room as well, with Virtue and Nobility Triumphing over Ignorance, painted originally for Palazzo Barbarigo, POI #6 on Walk No. 12.

There are far too many significant works here to list. The museum’s own website is the better guide.

West along Calle del Tragheto

Leaving Ca’ Rezzonico, proceed west along Calle del Tragheto for 140 metres. The name is a survival: a traghetto is a gondola ferry that crosses a canal at a fixed point, and passengers traditionally stand for the crossing.

The calle brings you into Campo San Barnaba along the southern flank of the church, POI #3.

A church stood on this site by the early Middle Ages. It was destroyed by fire in 1105 and later rebuilt. The building you see now is a further rebuilding, begun in 1749 under Lorenzo Boschetti and finished in 1776. The façade follows the design of the Gesuati, which appears on Walk No. 12. The bell tower is a different matter altogether: it is one of the oldest in Venice, dating back to the eleventh century, and was renovated in 1882.

The church has been deconsecrated. It now serves as an exhibition space for devices invented by Leonardo da Vinci. The art it holds, including works by Palma Giovane, is behind the exhibition ticket.

Eleventh-century campanile, eighteenth-century church, Renaissance war machines in the nave. Venice puts its buildings back to work.

Campo San Barnaba on film

The campo in front of the church, POI #4, has twice been drawn into modern film.

In Summertime, from 1955, Katharine Hepburn plays an American tourist trying to capture some footage of her own. She steps back too far and falls into the canal beside the campo, then clambers out on the nearby steps.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, from 1989, San Barnaba stands in for the library where Indy searches for the Grail Knight’s tomb. He later emerges through a manhole in the campo, pursued by the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword. Do not go looking for the manhole. It was a film prop, conjured through the magic of cinema.

Ponte dei Pugni

The full walk leaves the campo northwards here, crossing Ponte San Barnaba at the northeastern corner and heading up Calle de le Boteghe on a long loop through Ca’ Foscari and Campo Santa Margherita. As you cross the bridge on the northwest corner of the church, look to your right for the old campanile.

This slice stops short of that loop. But the walk comes back to the western edge of this campo later, and what waits there is worth the few steps now: Ponte dei Pugni, POI #16, reached on the return leg along Fondamenta Gherardini.

This is one of the city’s fighting bridges. Rival clans staged battles on it. Look down at the bridge surface for the commemorative footstep imprints set into the stone, marking where the combatants took their positions.

The contests took several forms, from bouts between champions to mass assaults for control of the bridge. They were painted often enough. A notable example is Gabriele Bella’s Ponte Santa Fosca, now hanging in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, POI #1 on Walk No. 10. One detail explains a great deal about those paintings: at the time of the battles the bridges had no balustrades. Anyone getting the worse of it went into the water.

The two factions were the Nicolotti, mostly fishermen, and the Castellani, mostly workers from the Arsenale. The division is older than the names. In the time of Doge Sebastiano Ziani the city was split between the Castellani and the Cannaruoli. In 1307 the Cannaruoli were assigned five parishes in Dorsoduro, and from then they were the Nicolotti. The rivalry ran well beyond the bridges. The same two factions met in the campi for the Forze d’Ercole, contests in which men locked shoulders to form the base of a human pyramid while others climbed, tier upon tier, until one figure stood alone at the top.

Walking context

This article covers the opening section of Walk No. 13, the Barnabotti Walk, together with one point of interest borrowed from its return leg.

The full walk begins at the Ca’ Rezzonico vaporetto stop and, after Campo San Barnaba, heads north on Calle de le Boteghe, then by Calle del Fabro and Calle del Capeler into the leafy Campiello dei Squelini and on to the land entrance of Ca’ Foscari at POI #5, now a university campus. From there the route makes a short loop across the bridge and along Calle Foscari and Crosera into San Polo, passing the church and campo of San Pantalon, which it shares with Walk No. 5, the Titian Walk.

The loop returns to Dorsoduro at the base of the truncated bell tower of Santa Margherita, POI #7, and works through Campo Santa Margherita with its guild buildings, market plaques and hexagonal wellheads. It leaves the campo past the façade of the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, which is featured in the next Dorsoduro walk, the Veronese Walk No. 14, and comes back along Fondamenta Gherardini to Ponte dei Pugni.

From the bridge the walk crosses the campo and leaves by the twin arches of Sotoportego del Casin dei Nobili on its southern side, passing beneath what was once a gambling house for nobles, then over Ponte Lombardo and along Fondamenta and Calle de la Toletta to finish at Ponte Maravegie. That is close to the start of Walk No. 12, the Salute Walk, if the day is still young.

The full route can be followed on the Dorsoduro walking map.

Practical visitor notes

Ca’ Rezzonico is the one stop on this stretch that needs proper time set aside. Check current opening arrangements and ticketing on the museum’s own site before you plan the day around it.

The church of San Barnaba is no longer a working church, and its interior is now given over to the Leonardo exhibition. If the Palma Giovane works are your reason for going in, you will need the exhibition ticket.

Palazzo Stern and Ca’ Rezzonico sit on opposite sides of the vaporetto stop, so there is no wrong order. The well in the Stern courtyard rewards a slow look rather than a passing glance.

Campo San Barnaba is a lived-in square as well as a filmed one. Keep to the edges when it is busy, and remember that the footprints on Ponte dei Pugni are easily walked over without being seen.

Continue exploring

This Dorsoduro slice is the opening part of the wider Barnabotti Walk. Continue with the full route in 17 Walks in Venice, which carries on through Ca’ Foscari, San Pantalon and Campo Santa Margherita before returning to Ponte dei Pugni.

The walk sits comfortably beside its neighbours. The Salute Walk, No. 12, begins near where this one ends. The Veronese Walk, No. 14, takes up the Scuola Grande dei Carmini. Across the water in San Polo, the Titian Walk, No. 5, shares San Pantalon with this route.

For more on how wellheads, churches, guild buildings and open squares hold a Venetian neighbourhood together – and on the campo as an arena for the Nicolotti and the Castellani – see The Fabric of Venice.

Modern image of the Ponte dei Pugni by Didier descouens on Wikimedia Commons.