This street is “Barbaria de le Tole”, which is where tree trunks would be worked and fashioned into wooden tables or ‘Tole’ in Venetian. The origin of the name is rather bizzarre and still disputed. Some say that Barbarie was a playful word used by workers who compared themsevles to barbers trimming the fuzzy splinters of the raw wooden logs.
Others claim Barbarie comes from the fact that centuries ago a great number of these wooden boards would be shipped to the modern states of Marocco, Algeria and Tunisia, often referred to as “Barbarian lands”.
