Venetian Arsenal

Where it sits. The Arsenale occupies the eastern end of Venice, filling much of the Castello district behind a rampart roughly three kilometres long. At its greatest extent it covered about 45 hectares, some fifteen per cent of the city, and it is still large enough that most visitors never realise how much of Venice is behind those walls. Its water gate and its land gate open onto the Campo dell'Arsenale, where two long basins run inland; from the bridge in front of the gate you can see the internal docks and the two brick towers that once carried a chain across the channel.

What it was. Construction is traditionally dated to 1104, though a Byzantine-style yard may have existed here from the 8th century. In 1320 the much larger Arsenale Nuovo was added, and from then on the Venetian Republic built, armed and maintained its entire navy in one enclosure. At its peak in the early 16th century some 16,000 workers, the arsenalotti, were employed here, and the yard could assemble a galley in a day from standardised prefabricated parts, an achievement not matched anywhere in Europe until the Industrial Revolution. Venice pioneered frame-first hull construction here, which was faster and used less timber than the Roman hull-first method, and drew its oak from a reserved forest in the Montello hills. The yard also developed artillery: bombards from the 1370s, small arms whose muzzle velocity outmatched the crossbow, and the galleass, the oar-and-sail gun platform used at Lepanto in 1571. Dante had already used the Arsenale as a simile for hell in the Inferno, with its cauldrons of boiling pitch.

The gate. The Porta Magna, built around 1460, is usually described as the first work of Renaissance architecture in Venice, modelled on the Roman Arch of the Sergii at Pula in Istria, then Venetian territory, and attributed to Antonio Gambello working from a design by Jacopo Bellini. The marble lions in front of it were looted from Piraeus near Athens in 1687. The largest of them carries a band of runic inscription across its shoulder, cut by Scandinavian mercenaries in the 11th century and unreadable for centuries afterwards, which makes this one of the strangest objects in the city: a Greek lion, defaced by Vikings, standing guard over an Italian shipyard.

On screen. The Arsenale itself is a working naval facility and mostly off limits, which is why film units treat Venice as a city of public bridges instead. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One was due to begin its entire production here on 20 February 2020, with three weeks in Venice before moving to Rome; Italy's first outbreak stopped it before it began, and Venice was one of the last locations to be picked up, well over a year later, before principal photography wrapped in September 2021. The finished film uses the city for its long night sequence, with a party in a palazzo and a fight beside the water. Venice has taken the same role for a run of action films, from the canal chases of The Italian Job remake to the flooded piazza set pieces of Spider-Man: Far From Home, filmed in the city in 2018.

What you can actually visit. Two long stretches are open. The Corderie della Tana, the 16th-century rope walk running more than 300 metres in a single hall, and the Artiglierie and Gaggiandre boat sheds host the Venice Biennale, the art edition in odd years and the architecture edition in even ones, roughly from May to November; a ticket to the Biennale is the standard way inside. The Museo Storico Navale beside the entrance, with the separate Padiglione delle Navi ship pavilion, is open year round and holds Venetian galley models, the last royal barges and a room of ceremonial weapons. The northern basin, Arsenale Nord, is reached by its own waterbus stop and hosts occasional exhibitions and the historic boat workshop.

Getting there and timing. Vaporetto lines 1, 4.1 and 5.1 stop at Arsenale, one stop past San Zaccaria and about fifteen minutes on foot from Piazza San Marco along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Castello is the quietest of the six sestieri, and the streets behind the Arsenale, around Via Garibaldi and the Giardini, remain genuinely residential. April to June and September to October are the best months; the Biennale season fills hotels but also opens the buildings. Winter brings acqua alta and thin light, but the eastern city is close to empty and the walk along the walls is at its most atmospheric.