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Venice Arsenal: view from the top of the Torre di Porta Nuova, towards the inside of the historic center (on the left the Campanile di San Marco). (Bazzmann Archive / Venipedia)

This place played a fundamental role in the history of Venice: it was a great shipyard where boats were built and repaired. Not only that, inside, in the glorious moments of the Serenissima, there were real quarters populated by workers and dockers. It anticipated the concept of the assembly-line factory by many centuries. This building was so important for the city that even the father of the Italian language, so called Dante Alighieri, dedicated a passage to it in his famous poem 'Divine Comedy'.

The term arsenal derives from the Arabic expression "darsina'a" (which mixes the words dock and shipyard), subsequently modified into the Venetian form "darzanà" (from which the Dante coining "arzanà" derives), "arzanàl" (or "arsenàl ") and finally arsenal.The foundation of this large shipyard dates back to 1104 under the Doge of Ordelafo Falier and began from two islands called "Twins". From the 14th century, it gradually began to expand by increasing the number of construction sites and buildings such as the "Casa del Canevo" (building used for the manufacture of hawsers, redesigned in 1579

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