TOP 5 NARROWEST ALLEYS IN VENICE

Tour Venice narrowest alleys with us today! Unique as a city, Venice’s urban plan expands like a labyrinth of intricate passageways dotted with houses, sumptuous palaces and windy canals. Its maze-like shape confuses visitors’ sense of orientation, whereas its bizarre toponymy makes it even more challenging: “calle”, “calle lunga”, “calle larga” and “salizada” are just some of the Venetian place names that you will come across when wandering through the 1,198 streets of Venice’s main island.

The term “calle” comes from the Latin “callis”, which means “path”, a word that sounds very appropriate if you consider the width of most calli, which look more like walkways than regular streets. As you can imagine in the city, land was limited and for this reason it had to be exploited to the maximum every time a new building was constructed. The strict building regulations of the Serenissima complicated matters, as they required builders to always leave a space for public passage. And so the solution to the problem often led to prefer the volume of the building to the size of the passageway, creating streets that were sometimes so narrow that it was difficult to move easily in both directions.

Sometimes, however, the situation seems to have gotten out of hand, as proven by some streets with almost prohibitive dimensions well below 1 m (3.2 ft) in width. In the top 5 of the narrowest streets of Venice, the following are worthy of a mention: