Venice Sights and Monuments

By 1400, the Arsenal was already the world’s most extensive industrial complex, with 3,000 employees (known as “Arsenalotti”) and a production capacity which, by the 1500s, had reached no less than six galleys a month. This achievement was made possible by outstanding managerial talent and modern organisation of all aspects of production, from the procurement of timber to the preference for modular construction.
Over the course of the centuries, many major works were carried out, including the construction of laboratories, warehouses and, with the advent of gun powder, artillery rooms.The Arsenal represents a vast, striking and strategic area of the inner city covering about 32 hectares,of which 9 hectares are water, out of the total 670-hectare area of Venice, including the islands of Giudecca, Tronchetto, San Giorgio and the internal canals. The structure complex has represented the fundamental heart of the Venetian economy and civil history, so much so that in 1509 the Senate officially defined it as the "heart of the region of Veneto".

The grandiose palazzo, now the seat of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, was built in the second half of the seventeenth century for the noble and wealthy Pesaro family, to a project by the greatest Venetian baroque architect, Baldassarre Longhena, who also designed the church of the Salute and Ca’ Rezzonico. In creating Ca’ Pesaro, a masterpiece of Venetian baroque civic architecture, Longhena was inspired by Sansovinian classicism, elaborating solutions and idioms capable of expressing a new and sumptuous harmony. This is exemplified in the Grand Canal façade, with its complex composition, powerful but well-balanced: above a plinth decorated with lion-faces and monstrous headsrises a severe diamond-pointed, rusticated facade with two rows of windows, opened in the middle by twin doorways surmounted by mascarons and statues.

The building of this magnificent palace started in 1667, ordered by the Bon family to the ever-present Baldassare Longhena. The building had a long series of misfortunes and it is finally Rezzonico who finished the building in 1712, leaving the works to the architect Giorgio Massari.
The museum retraces the Venetian life lie it was in the 18th century. A lot of treasures, assembled since 1934, furniture, paintings and decorative objects found in numerous villas and Venetian palaces. You can visit a gigantic ballroom, enhanced by a series of remarkable architectural perspectives, a throne room with an admirable rococo ceiling painted by Tiepolo, the last of the great Venetian decorators. You ca dream about the fastuous Venice period when Casanova organized its famous orgies, games, balls, masquerades.

Venice's Ghetto, which is in the Cannaregio area, was originally a foundry - "G(h)etto" means "foundry" in Venetian . In 1516, the Jews of Venice were confined in this area by the Council of Ten. They gave the New Foundry island to the Jews with the agreement that they would be confined their during the night.

Initially this was for the protection of the Jews, but it gradually became a prison, with huge gates and guards. The peak of the ghetto's population was about 5,000. By World War II, the population had fallen to about 1.000.

Page 1 - 2 - 3