The melancholic air of the place is in part a product of the discrepancy between the grandeur of its history and what the city has become. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, some 200,000 people lived in Venice, not far short of three times its present population. Merchants from Germany, Greece, Turkey and a host of other countries maintained warehouses here; transactions in the banks and bazaars of the Rialto dictated the value of commodities all over the continent; in the dockyards of the Arsenale the workforce was so vast that a warship could be built and fitted out in a single day; and the Piazza San Marco was perpetually thronged with people here to set up business deals or report to the Republic's government. Nowadays it's no longer a living metropolis but rather the embodiment of a fabulous past, dependent for its survival largely on the people who come to marvel at its relics.
The monuments which draw the largest crowds are the Basilica di San Marco - the mausoleum of the city's patron saint - and the Palazzo Ducale - the home of the doge and all the governing councils. Certainly these are the most dramatic structures in the city: the first a mosaic-clad emblem of Venice's Byzantine origins, the second perhaps the finest of all secular Gothic buildings. Every parish rewards exploration, though - a roll-call of the churches worth visiting would feature over fifty names, and a list of the important paintings and sculptures they contain would be twice as long. Two of the distinctively Venetian institutions known as the Scuole retain some of the outstanding examples of Italian Renaissance art - the Scuola di San Rocco , with its dozens of pictures by Tintoretto, and the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni , decorated with a gorgeous sequence by Carpaccio.
The historic centre of Venice is made up of 118 islands, most of which began life as a micro-community, each with a parish church or two, and a square for public meetings. Though many Venetians maintain a strong attachment to their particular part of the city, the autonomy of these parishes has been eroded since the days when traffic between them moved by water. Some 400 bridges now tie the islands together, forming an amalgamation that's divided into six large administrative districts known as sestieri, three on each side of the Canal Grande.
The sestiere of San Marco is the zone where the majority of the essential sights are clustered, and is accordingly the most expensive and most crowded district of the city. On the east it's bordered by Castello , and on the north by Cannaregio - both of which become more residential, and poorer and quieter, the further you go from San Marco. On the other bank the largest of the sestieri is Dorsoduro , which stretches from the fashionable quarter at the tip of the Canal Grande, south of the Accademia gallery, to the docks in the west. Santa Croce , named after a now demolished church, roughly follows the curve of the Canal Grande from Piazzale Roma to a point just short of the Rialto, where it joins the commercially most active of the districts on this bank - San Polo .
To the uninitiated, the boundaries of the sestieri can seem utterly perplexing, and they are of little use as a means of structuring a guide. So, although in most instances this guide uses the name of a sestiere to indicate broadly which zone of the city we're in, the boundaries of our sections have been chosen for their practicality and do not, except in the case of San Marco, follow the city's official divisions. Most of the sestiere of Santa Croce, for example, is covered in the San Polo section, with the remnant covered in Dorsoduro, as the sestiere has no focal point for the visitor and very few sights
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