Bridge of Sighs

Interesting facts

The bridge was designed by Antonio Contin, nephew and pupil of Antonio da Ponte, the architect who rebuilt the Rialto Bridge.

It is built of white Istrian limestone and spans the Rio di Palazzo canal behind the Doge's Palace.

Eleven sculpted heads decorate the moulding of the arch, with a lion's head at the centre, and reclining figures fill the spandrels.

Between the windows sits the coat of arms of Doge Marino Grimani, crowned by an allegorical figure of Justice.

Each small window is filled with stone openwork in the form of four eight-petalled flowers.

Its playful volute-topped roofline was an early hint of the Baroque, unusual for a building with such a grim purpose.

The New Prisons it leads to were designed from 1580 onwards, because the old cells inside the Doge's Palace had become too small.

Its design inspired copies around the world, including enclosed bridges in Oxford, Cambridge and H. H. Richardson's 1888 jail in Pittsburgh.

Jacques Offenbach named his 1861 operetta after the bridge, and Turner, Canaletto and John Singer Sargent all painted it.

Why it is worth it

The name is younger than the bridge, and it was invented by a foreigner who never saw it used for its actual purpose. Built between 1600 and 1603 to link the Doge's Palace courtrooms to the New Prisons across the canal, the enclosed limestone passage was given its wistful English name more than two centuries later, when Lord Byron wrote of prisoners sighing at their last glimpse of Venice through its small barred windows. Inside, the passage is split into two separate corridors, and the views through the small stone-barred windows are narrow slivers of lagoon and sky — enough to make Byron’s story easy to believe.

Venice's most famous prisoner never crossed it at all. Giacomo Casanova was held in 1755 not in the New Prisons but in the Piombi, lead-roofed cells inside the palace attic itself, reserved for higher-status detainees. His celebrated 1756 escape went up through the ceiling, not sideways over the bridge — he cut through the roof, crossed the palace's upper floors, and walked out the front door dressed as a gentleman, bridge untouched.

The romantic reputation the bridge never earned in its own time was cemented for tourists by a different, much later source: the 1979 film A Little Romance, which popularized the belief that a kiss shared beneath it in a gondola at sunset guarantees eternal love.

Getting there

Located in Venice. Venice Marco Polo Airport (VCE) is about 8 km away.

Bridge of Sighs

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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