Beyond the most popular itineraries, Piazza San Marco, the Bridge of Sighs and the Rialto Bridge, there are whole areas of Venice to be explored to fully understand the authentic soul of this millenary city. Why don’t you look for the itinerary suggested by the Sustainable Tourism Service of the City of Venice to the participants of the 40th Su and Zo per i ponti (Up and down the bridges)? Discover the wells of Venice: walking around Venice, in fact, you can often come across the wellheads, authentic works of art scattered in every corner of the city.
The unmistakable appearance of “campi”, courtyards, cloisters and gardens of Venice would not be such as we know it without the wells, today no longer in use but for centuries an essential element of Venetian daily life, at least until the construction of the first aqueduct, at the end of the nineteenth century . The wells, thanks to an ingenious system for the collection and filtering of rainwater, assured to a city built on the brackish water of the lagoon, the supply of fresh water: “Venice is on water and has no water”, so in fact wrote Marin Sanudo, Venetian historian and chronicler, around the early 1500s. The Venetian well is an underground cistern for the collection, purification and conservation of rainwater, and the wellhead is the visible part of the real well. You can see different wells, some of which are very old, a in the Archaeological Museum and the Natural History Museum of Venice.
FROM “DeTourism”