The great waterfront walk of Castello: grand hotels, Vivaldi's church and the Greek quarter, from the Doge's Palace to the Giardini.
Last updated August 14, 2026
In a nutshell: the Riva degli Schiavoni is Venice's grandest waterfront - the Hotel Danieli and the city's most expensive hotels along the Bacino, Vivaldi's La Pietà church, the Greek church of San Giorgio dei Greci with its icon museum, and the quiet Campo Bandiera e Moro where Vivaldi was born. The walk continues east past the monument to Victor Emmanuel II toward the Giardini. See also the Castello overview, the Arsenale and where to eat.
The Riva takes its name from the Dalmatian sailors - their homeland was then called Slavonia, or Schiavonia - who moored their boats here and kept stalls for selling fish. Once a simple landing place, it was paved with Istrian stone and lined with palaces and churches until it became one of the favourite walks of the Venetians in the days of the Republic. Just after the Ponte della Paglia rises the gloomy, austere Palazzo delle Prigioni, built as an extension of the Doge's Palace prisons, which had become too small for the number of inmates; it was here that Casanova was locked up, and his account of his flights describes the escape from this very building. A little further on, the red of the 15th-century Palazzo Dandolo - today the Hotel Danieli - immediately catches the eye. After the next bridge, a sottoportego on the left leads to Campo San Zaccaria and its namesake church. Continuing along the Riva past the following bridge you come to the Chiesa della Pietà, better known as the Church of Vivaldi, because it was in the nearby convent and conservatory that the composer taught for most of his life; deconsecrated long ago, it is now the venue for numerous concerts in honour of that famous Venetian musician. The Riva continues under different names: the second stretch, after the Hotel Gabrielli, is called Ca' di Dio, after the hospice for pilgrim fathers of that name, designed and built by Sansovino in the early 1500s.
The Riva was never laid out for promenading: it was built as part of the working port of San Marco, and large vessels moored here as recently as a few years ago. Today it is lined with several of the city's grandest, best-known hotels, and the view across the water to San Giorgio Maggiore, one vaporetto stop away on line 2, is among the best in the city. Before you turn right, glance the other way: the equestrian statue honours Victor Emmanuel II, who guided Italy toward unification and was crowned its first king in 1861; just past it, over the next bridge, stands the La Pietà church with its four-column portico, where Vivaldi himself directed the music. The Hotel Danieli is worth a peek even if you are not a guest: since 1820 this Neo-Gothic palace, the former Palazzo Dandolo, has ranked as Venice's most exclusive address, and although it still floods routinely in winter, the lobby - old-style chandeliers, marble, a water-taxi entrance - remains a spectacle in itself.
Music and baroque architecture come together at La Pietà, whose formal name is the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione - the most striking church along Castello's waterfront, built to Giorgio Massari's design shortly after Vivaldi's death. Five evenings a week the ensemble I Virtuosi Italiani plays here (tickets €30), sustaining a tradition that reaches back to the early 1700s, when the young priest Antonio Vivaldi was placed in charge of the violin teaching at the attached Ospedale della Pietà, the orphanage whose girls inspired some of his best-loved concertos. The Four Seasons dominates the bill, with excursions into other music by the Venetian master and his peers every couple of weeks. It makes a gentle introduction to live classical music: no formal dress code, and applause at the wrong moment is forgiven. The oval auditorium, shaped to flatter the sound, is worth a look even without a concert, and Tiepolo's ceiling fresco of a celestial orchestra may conceal Vivaldi's own face among the players. The church belonged to the ospedaletti - charitable homes for orphans, funded by anonymous donors in an era when plague, illicit masked parties and a booming sex trade had left Venice with an extraordinary number of parentless children. The state educated the girls as musicians, and diplomats invited to their concerts were well advised to hand out tips: you never knew whose illegitimate daughter you might otherwise offend.
Venice's Greek community, which grew rapidly after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, was granted permission in 1539 to build San Giorgio dei Greci just behind the Riva. It remains the centre of the Orthodox Archdiocese for Italy and Southern Europe. The exterior is pure Venetian, but the interior is emphatically Orthodox: a single aisle-less nave lined with wooden stalls, a matroneo (women's gallery) tucked into a mezzanine, and the eye drawn to the gilded iconostasis of 46 icons, most by the 16th-century Cretan painter Michael Danaskinàs. Simone Sorella's slender bell tower, finished in 1592, has tilted from the very beginning. The Museo delle Icone (€4, reduced €2) next door occupies a 17th-century confraternity house by Baldassare Longhena and holds more than 80 icons, from a wide-eyed Byzantine Madonna to an 18th-century Ark of Noah in which unicorns stroll among the animals going in two by two. The Greek brotherhood had won its charter in the late 1400s in recognition of the debt Venice's publishing industry owed to Greek scholars.
A single block inland from the Riva degli Schiavoni, Campo Bandiera e Moro keeps the easy atmosphere of a provincial square: pensioners on benches, friends chatting over coffee at outdoor tables, children circling the two carved wellheads. The grandest structure is a four-storey palazzo - now a luxury hotel - with Venetian Gothic windows, marble trim and ghostly traces of painted facades. Rare for Venice, the campo honours no church but three martyrs of the Risorgimento: Domenico Moro and the Bandiera brothers, executed in Calabria in 1844, whose family home stood in the smaller palazzo beside the hotel. The square's older name, Campo della Bragora, likely refers to the boggy ground underneath. And one more famous son was born nearby: Antonio Vivaldi, who arrived in 1678 in a house on Calle del Dose, the alley joining the square to the waterfront, and whose carrot-coloured hair earned him the moniker il prete rosso - the red priest.
Past the bombastic equestrian Monument to Victor Emmanuel II - Italy's first king, his horse trampling a roaring Venetian lion - the waterfront turns into the Riva dei Sette Martiri, named for seven partisans executed here by the Nazis in 1944, and then the Riva dei Partigiani running along the Giardini Napoleonici. Just offshore, La Partigiana (the Partisan Woman), a 1,200kg bronze by Augusto Murer set on Istrian stone plinths designed by Carlo Scarpa, sinks and resurfaces with the tide. Between December and the close of Carnevale a funfair takes over the lagoon side of the Riva degli Schiavoni, while the Giardini's playgrounds, ringed by 19th-century monuments, give Venetian children room to run.