Photo Gallery: Venice, Italy, A True “City of Water”

Venice, located in the northeast of Italy, is a renowned international tourist destination known for its architecture, paintings, sculptures, and operas that hold significant importance and influence worldwide. However, Venice is most famously known for its title as the “City of Water,” even earning the reputation of being “born from water, made beautiful by water, and thriving because of water.”

Surrounded by the sea on all sides, Venice is a lagoon city composed of 118 small islands, interconnected by 177 waterways known as canals, creating a network similar to a spider web. While Venice now has railways, roads, bridges, and land connections, there are no roads for cars or trains within the city area. The city’s transportation mainly relies on water vessels, with the most famous being the gondola. These graceful and slender boats with unique designs have long been the primary mode of transportation for the residents living on the lagoon.

The charm of Venice’s scenery is inseparable from water, which in turn, is inseparable from bridges. The city is adorned with over 400 bridges of various sizes, adding to the most beautiful sights on the islands of Venice. These bridges include beam bridges, arch bridges, and continuous multi-hole bridges, constructed using a variety of materials such as stone, brick, wood, iron, steel, and concrete, giving each bridge a distinctive texture. The colors of these bridges, whether bright or dark, ranging from red, white, to black, harmonize with the surrounding environment. The diverse shapes of these bridges range from dragon-like forms, rainbow-like designs, grand structures, to petite crossings.

Among the larger and more well-known bridges spanning the Grand Canal are the Rialto Bridge (Ponte di Rialto), the Academy Bridge (Ponte dell’Accademia), the Scalzi Bridge (Ponte degli Scalzi), and the contemporary new bridge – the Constitution Bridge (Ponte della Costituzione).

In addition to these four famous bridges on the Grand Canal, there is another small yet iconic bridge, the Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri), also one of the must-visit attractions in Venice. Located near St. Mark’s Square, this arched bridge spans a small river between the Doge’s Palace and the dungeons. It acquired its name as it is said that the prisoners, upon passing through this bridge on their way to the execution, would sigh, thus giving it its name. The span of the bridge is small, featuring an early Baroque-style design resembling a closed-off house, with only two small windows on one side facing the canal.