Gillian Knows Best guide to campi in Venice
A few of my favorite places to take a break
One of the most marvelous things about Italian cities and towns is the Piazza. When I lived in Rome the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti was where I met pals for coffee in the morning and for a late afternoon spritz and potato chips. I spent many hours on the steps of the Fontana dei Catecumeni soaking in the warm winter sunshine or waiting for a whisper of a cool breeze on a steamy summer night. It is where neighborhood kids play soccer and tourists eat gelato. A true Third Place1. Space is at a premium in Venice. Public space even more so. Venice only has one Piazza, Piazza San Marco.2 It is more a formal living room than casual family den. While I love the historic cafes that sit underneath the Procuratie, this is not really a space for the everyday hang out. Those are not benches you see stacked up. They are passerelle, the raised walkways used for aqua alta.
If we don’t have piazza’s here in Venice what do we have? We have campi. The word campo (campi is the plural) means field. Venice is a series of islands connected by bridges. That happened relatively recently. Before Napoleon and the Austrians came and filled in canals and built all those bridges those islands and the people that lived on them were more separate. Campi served all kinds of communal purposes for each part of town, like growing food and grazing animals, even as burial spaces.3 In each campo there was a cistern/well that collected rainwater. It was covered by a vera da pozzo. This is a Venetian term for the locked protective top. Water was precious resource so that meant there was an authorized person, usually the parish priest, called a piovàn (water, god, rain, its all connected) in charge of opening them at designated daily times.
There are 102 campi and 134 campielli in Venice. The large campi are anchored with a church and have lots of benches and cafes, like Campo Santa Margherita and San Giacomo dall'Orio. Smaller ones, campielli, like Campiello de la Cason ai Santi Apostoli (where the prison for Canareggio was!) and Campiello del Remer, near the Rialto market that might only have a few plants.
You already know that parks are not really my thing and that I prefer places where you can see all of the edges. Campi in Venice are very much my thing. These are a few of my favorites.
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