This route takes you along the smaller waterways in Venice and eventually onto the Canal Grande, one of the three major canals of the city. These other smaller waterways you are on now are not officially called “canale” in Venice but “rio”, which means “river” in Italian. There are about 150 of these rii that form the sinewy web of the city, on which only small boats can pass through. Venice was and still is essentially a collection of small islands divided by these waterways; these islands are connected by the 340 bridges around the city, without which it would be impossible to walk around. The notion of building a city upon marshy waters might seem bizzarre to outsiders and a question that puzzles many visitors is: what’s under the city’s buildings? The answer is simple: stilts. Venice in fact is all built on wooden stilts, which are fixed in the sandy ground below, which is how the first inhabitants built their houses on what must have been an inhospitable area. Although the water is not the cleanest, it is replaced every six hours by the tide, which flows in from the rivers on the mainland, assuring a constant reflux of the waters in the lagoon.
