The Bridge of Sighs
Antonio Contin (1566 to 1600) · about 1600 to 1603
You will cross this bridge from the inside, in a narrow enclosed corridor with small stone grilles for windows, and it is worth pausing to look out. Through the lattice you catch a slice of the canal below and the lagoon beyond, the same view that prisoners saw as they were led from the courtrooms of the palace to the cells across the water. The romantic story, popularised by Lord Byron, is that the condemned sighed at their last glimpse of Venice. The truth is more prosaic: by the time the bridge was built the Republic's harshest punishments were rare, and most of those who crossed were petty offenders on their way to relatively humane cells.
The bridge was built at the very beginning of the seventeenth century by Antonio Contin, whose uncle Antonio da Ponte had designed the Rialto Bridge. It is really two corridors side by side, separated by a wall, so that prisoners going in and out did not meet. From outside, on the Ponte della Paglia by the waterfront, look at the white Istrian stone facade with its scrolls, masks and small barred windows, an elegant Baroque skin over a purely practical passage. The carved heads on the exterior are meant to ward off evil.
The bridge connected the old palace, where the courts of the Council of Ten and the state inquisitors sat, with the New Prisons that Antonio da Ponte had begun in the fifteen eighties. Napoleon's arrival in 1797 ended the Republic and eventually emptied the cells, and the bridge became one of the most photographed objects in the city. The most memorable moment is simple: stop at the grille, press your face to the stone and look out through the same holes that generations of prisoners looked through.
Did You Know? The name Bridge of Sighs was made famous by Lord Byron in the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1818.
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