Visualizing Venice
I have used a few free minutes of spare time in the last two days to create some interesting ways of looking at Venice. First of all, let’s examine the path I take to work every day:
It looks reasonably straight, but every little left and right turn is critical to my successful navigation. Unlike in many cities, whose grid-based street systems permit near infinite ways to navigate from point A to point B, Venice has the unusual constraint of consisting of individual island units, each connected to its neighbors by two or more bridges. This can be very confusing to the novice, because the decision to cross one bridge can directly (and detrimentally) affect your navigational possibilities down the road (or down the calle?).
Crossing bridges is, of course, a matter of necessity when walking for more than about 2 minutes in any direction in Venice. If you’re lost, though, or know you’re close to your destination but can’t quite find it, you would do well to not cross too many bridges, or to carefully note which ones you do cross, because you might otherwise find yourself in a very different part of the city before long. While probably the most useful navigational maneuver one can execute in Venice, back-tracking is also the most frustrating, especially when you’ve spent a few minutes walking down a promising street or two, only to turn the corner at the end and find yourself facing the water of a canal (with no bridge to cross).
Okay, enough about Venetian urban topography. Here is what the above path looks like overlaid on an actual map of Venice:
It makes a bit more sense when you look at it that way, but you’ll notice that I have to cross 14 bridges and travel on 15 islands to get to work and back. View the full-size version and try tracing a path with your finger that crosses a different bridge somewhere along the way. You’ll see that, frequently, such a seemingly small change can force the rest of the journey to follow an entirely different route. That’s not always a bad thing, but you have to know what you’re doing.
I also created three word clouds using Wordle. The one immediately below shows the names of the six sestieri (plus Giudecca), sized proportionally to the number of unique street addresses that can be found in each. Being the largest, geographically, it’s no surprise that Cannaregio and Castello have the most.
Below shows, sized according to frequency, the most common types of streets in Venice. In North America, we have “streets,” “roads,” “avenues,” “crescents,” and so on. But in Venice, there’s the calle (the most generic and common kind of “street” in Venice, hence its dominance of the graphic below), corte (short street or courtyard), fondamenta (canal-side street), sotoportego (tunnel/underpass beneath houses and buildings), and so on.
And finally, below, we have a very dense word cloud showing the most common street names in Venice today. Only a few stand out (indicating that they’re not that much more popular than the smaller ones in the illustration), but they give you an idea of some of the more popular things you could have once found along Venetian streets: churches, priests, bakeries, boat-makers, and so on. Back in the day, Venice’s streets were named for whatever best described them (an historically useful aid to navigation – “turn left at the street with the bakery”), but there having been more than one street with a bakery on it, so too are there now several Calli del Forno, albeit in different parts of the city. View it full-size and you’ll quickly get a feel for the names of families, churches, and occupations that defined the Venetian Republic and made it great.
It looks reasonably straight, but every little left and right turn is critical to my successful navigation. Unlike in many cities, whose grid-based street systems permit near infinite ways to navigate from point A to point B, Venice has the unusual constraint of consisting of individual island units, each connected to its neighbors by two or more bridges. This can be very confusing to the novice, because the decision to cross one bridge can directly (and detrimentally) affect your navigational possibilities down the road (or down the calle?).
Crossing bridges is, of course, a matter of necessity when walking for more than about 2 minutes in any direction in Venice. If you’re lost, though, or know you’re close to your destination but can’t quite find it, you would do well to not cross too many bridges, or to carefully note which ones you do cross, because you might otherwise find yourself in a very different part of the city before long. While probably the most useful navigational maneuver one can execute in Venice, back-tracking is also the most frustrating, especially when you’ve spent a few minutes walking down a promising street or two, only to turn the corner at the end and find yourself facing the water of a canal (with no bridge to cross).
Okay, enough about Venetian urban topography. Here is what the above path looks like overlaid on an actual map of Venice:
It makes a bit more sense when you look at it that way, but you’ll notice that I have to cross 14 bridges and travel on 15 islands to get to work and back. View the full-size version and try tracing a path with your finger that crosses a different bridge somewhere along the way. You’ll see that, frequently, such a seemingly small change can force the rest of the journey to follow an entirely different route. That’s not always a bad thing, but you have to know what you’re doing.
I also created three word clouds using Wordle. The one immediately below shows the names of the six sestieri (plus Giudecca), sized proportionally to the number of unique street addresses that can be found in each. Being the largest, geographically, it’s no surprise that Cannaregio and Castello have the most.
Below shows, sized according to frequency, the most common types of streets in Venice. In North America, we have “streets,” “roads,” “avenues,” “crescents,” and so on. But in Venice, there’s the calle (the most generic and common kind of “street” in Venice, hence its dominance of the graphic below), corte (short street or courtyard), fondamenta (canal-side street), sotoportego (tunnel/underpass beneath houses and buildings), and so on.
And finally, below, we have a very dense word cloud showing the most common street names in Venice today. Only a few stand out (indicating that they’re not that much more popular than the smaller ones in the illustration), but they give you an idea of some of the more popular things you could have once found along Venetian streets: churches, priests, bakeries, boat-makers, and so on. Back in the day, Venice’s streets were named for whatever best described them (an historically useful aid to navigation – “turn left at the street with the bakery”), but there having been more than one street with a bakery on it, so too are there now several Calli del Forno, albeit in different parts of the city. View it full-size and you’ll quickly get a feel for the names of families, churches, and occupations that defined the Venetian Republic and made it great.
