Castello
Sprawling historic quarter, home to a vast former naval shipyard that once armed an empire.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Castello in Venice explains why the city's bishop spent nearly a thousand years banished to this marshy edge of the city, while the doges kept Saint Mark's Basilica as their own private chapel at the center of power. It follows the standoff between church and state through 1451, when Venice finally created a patriarch but still kept him out here, and traces the rise of the Arsenale, founded in 1104 into the largest naval complex in Europe. Dante himself walked past its boiling pitch vats and borrowed the image for the Inferno.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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