Sestiere Cannaregio

This guide to Sestiere Cannaregio in Venice walks through the world's first Jewish ghetto, founded in 1516 when the city walled off a patch of reclaimed marsh for refugees fleeing Spain and Portugal, permitting their trade but not their freedom. It traces how a community meant to be contained instead grew for centuries, building upward into the unusually tall, narrow houses that still line these canals, until Napoleon's troops tore the gates down in 1797.