Discover Rialto Market

The market is not one building but a zoned quarter, and the zoning is the architecture. After the fire of 1514 the whole district was rebuilt to a plan that gave each trade its own porticoed run, and the lane names still record it: Naranzeria for oranges, Speziali for spices, Casaria for cheese, Erberia for greens. The porticoes were the market floor -- covered, continuous, and open to the canal at one end.

The Fabbriche Vecchie along the Ruga degli Orefici are Scarpagnino's, built immediately after the fire: plain, repetitive, arcaded ranges designed as commercial infrastructure rather than display. Sansovino's Fabbriche Nove of 1554-56, running along the Grand Canal, do the same job with a heavier classical hand and a longer frontage.

The Pescheria is the youngest and the most theatrical. Domenico Rupolo built it in 1907 with the painter Cesare Laurenti, and it is deliberately not of its date: a two-storey open loggia of pointed arches, brick and Istrian stone, with carved capitals of fish and fishermen, put up in a Neo-Gothic idiom meant to look four hundred years older than it is. It is a twentieth-century building pretending to be medieval, and it works because the trade inside it genuinely is.

Everything here is open on at least two sides. There are no doors, no windows and no heating anywhere in the market -- it is a set of roofs on columns, which is why it empties so completely at closing time.