October 17, 2018

Warwick in Venice Site Visit – The Arsenale and The Museo Storico Navale

The unique opportunity to go and visit a historical site within Venice can give a more clear image to the topics being taught by through the university module syllabus. During my second week studying here, professors Jonathan Davis and Luca Mola organised a site visit to the famous Arsenale and the Museo Storico Navale.


We set out to explore the myths surrounding the foundations of Venice’s empire and the policies which it’s Republic created to control it’s territories both on the mainland (stato da terra) and at sea (stato da mar).The site of the Arsenale spreads across a large section of the district of Castello, the most eastern sestieri of the Serenissima. Fortified by the sixteenth century, the tall red brick walls of the former shipyard dominate the neighbourhood of Castello, serving as a lasting reminder of it’s impressive industrial history as the biggest centre for building ships and storing ammunitions and artillery in the Renaissance era. At the dawn of the sixteenth century Venice had a huge population of eighteen hundred thousand, making it one of the four biggest cities in Europe at the time.


The Arsenale as an institution was essential to Venetian trade and the conservation of it’s maritime bases. From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in contrast to it’s naval rival of Genoa which was mainly privately-ran, the state took on the task of organising Venice’s military fleet.

The fourteenth century saw the state develop the merchant galley which could be rented out for trade missions and to carry expensive goods such as spices and cloth. Galleys, until the mid sixteenth century, were based on a previous Roman model with a hull size of five meters. They were relatively quick but ultimately they depended on a crew of 220 people (consisting of three rowers to a bench) who were all willing and ready to act incase of an attack. This work force expanded further during the fifteenth century due to competition with the Ottoman turks. At it’s height the Arsenale provided jobs for around three thousand people who lived and worked in Castello and were employed to prepare the fleets in both times of war and peace.

The gates to the Arsenale were built in 1460 and survive as the first Renaissance monument in Venice. It features a pointed arch, typical of Gothic architecture, and also statues of the gods Neptune and Mars to illustrate the power of Venice as symbols of it’s military and trade. The success of the Venetians at the 1571 battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans is celebrated at the top of this archway. Most notably, the decoration of these gates exemplifies an unique mixture of Eastern and Western traditions which is integral to Venice’s history. The statues of lions, collected around the foot of the gates, were placed there in the late seventeenth century. On the far left there is a lion stolen from Athens.


The Museo Storico Navale is now housed within a simple building in which they used to keep grain deposits, demonstrating Venice’s style of government as a paternalistic state. Within the museum we encountered many intriguing artefacts such as a series of nautical charts. The navigational maps were made since the fourteenth century to trace the geographical distances between various ports. There were also detailed maps and plans of the Arsenale itself which illustrated it’s growth. Alongside a surprisingly accurate plan of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari, which was created in 1500 by taking measurements from each of Venice’s bell towers, overall I was struck by the Venetian’s skill for cartography.


Due to the progression of English and Dutch ships, by the seventeenth century the military prowess of the Venetian galleys began to decline because they could not carry as many canons as their naval competitors. Worse still in this later gradual decline, following Napoleon’s invasion of the Republic in 1797 the French forces destroyed a large part of the contents of the Arsenale. Most devastatingly, this included the grand ceremonial barge used by the doges of Venice on Ascension Day called ‘Il Bucintoro’.

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