The history of Venice

An enclosed bridge carried prisoners to the new jail

The Bridge of Sighs is a short, fully enclosed footbridge of white Istrian stone, built to link the Doge's Palace to the prison across the canal. It still carries that name today, though it now serves tourists rather than prisoners. Its facade is symmetrical, carved with a row of eleven heads, and bears the coat of arms of Marino Grimani, the doge who ordered it built.

The bridge exists because the old prison inside the Doge's Palace, called the Piombi, had become too cramped. A fire in 1577 had already damaged the palace. In 1580, the architect Gianantonio Rusconi was told to design a new prison building, the Prigioni Nuove, across the narrow Rio di Palazzo. Rusconi died before it was finished, and Antonio da Ponte, the man who had rebuilt the palace after the fire and designed the Rialto Bridge, took over the work.

Da Ponte's nephew, Antonio Contin, designed the bridge itself. Antonio Contin split the inside into two narrow corridors, separated by a wall, so prisoners walking toward judgment never passed those already convicted. Small windows, barred with stone grilles, let in only slivers of light and city view. The bridge was finished soon after 1600.

For two centuries it did its grim job quietly. The romance came later. By the late 1700s, Venetians were already calling it the Ponte dei Sospiri, the Bridge of Sighs. Lord Byron spread the name further in English through his poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," imagining condemned men sighing at their last glimpse of Venice before vanishing into the cells. The story is more legend than record. Most prisoners crossing it faced short sentences, not execution, but the name stuck anyway.

Napoleon's army ended the courts that used this bridge

In May 1797, Napoleon's army ended the Republic of Venice, which had ruled itself for over a thousand years. The courts that had sent prisoners across the bridge stopped working. The Prigioni Nuove kept its purpose as a jail for a while longer, but the bridge's judicial role was finished.

Casanova and Byron attached legend to a prison crossing

Venice fell under new rulers, first French, then Austrian. The Doge's Palace lost its government function and slowly turned into something people visited rather than feared. The bridge's small windows had stone grilles. Visitors began asking guides why it had such a sad name.

Giacomo Casanova's escape, already decades old by then, fed the bridge's growing legend. Casanova had broken out of the Piombi, the lead-roofed cells inside the Doge's Palace itself, in 1756. Some tellings place him crossing the Bridge of Sighs on his way out. Others say he never used it at all, since the Piombi sat on the palace side of the canal, not the prison side. Either way, his name attached itself to the bridge's story.

Lord Byron's poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" carried the name abroad. Byron pictured condemned men sighing as they glimpsed the lagoon one last time before the cell door closed. The name itself had already been in local use by the end of the 1700s, before Byron ever wrote a line about it.

A museum bridge gained a kissing legend below it

The Doge's Palace became a public museum in the early 1900s, and the bridge opened to anyone willing to walk its corridor. Decades of grime had turned the white Istrian stone gray. A cleaning restored its pale color, and visitors could see it as it looked when Antonio Contin built it.

A legend grew up around the canal below rather than the bridge itself. Couples began kissing in gondolas passing beneath it at sunset, as the bells of St. Mark's Campanile rang, believing it would bind them in love forever. Nothing about the bridge's grim original purpose supports the story, but it became one of the most repeated things said about the spot.

Restoration returned the bridge's stone to its original white

A three-year restoration finished in 2003, costing 2.8 million euros. Workers cleaned the stone again until it shone the way it had when it first went up around 1603.

Millions now view the bridge without crossing it

The Bridge of Sighs now draws more than 12 million visitors a year, nearly all of them seeing it from the outside, from the Ponte della Paglia or a passing gondola. Walking through its corridor requires a ticket to the Doge's Palace and its old prison rooms, following the same route prisoners once walked under guard. The coat of arms of Marino Grimani still sits above the windows, and the carved figure of Justice still looks out over the water below.