Venice Mercerie

The Mercerie -- Marzarie in Venetian dialect -- is the shortest and busiest route between Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge, a chain of narrow shopping streets that has served as Venice's principal commercial artery since the earliest days of the Republic. The name comes from the merceria, the trade of the mercers who once sold fine imported cloth and small luxury goods here, and shops have lined both sides of the route, floor after floor, for centuries.

This is a working thoroughfare before it is an attraction -- residents use it to cross between San Marco and Rialto, and it is the route deliveries take on foot. Stopping in the narrowest sections, or in the sottoporteghi, blocks a street with no way around.

A great deal of what is sold along the Mercerie as Venetian is not made in Venice: mass-produced glass sold as Murano and machine-made lace sold as Burano are both common here. The Vetro Artistico Murano trademark is the reliable check for glass, and the island workshops themselves are the surer place to buy it.

The Mercerie run from beneath the Torre dell'Orologio (the clock tower) on Piazza San Marco to the Rialto Bridge, and can be walked in well under fifteen minutes -- though the crowds and shop windows make most visitors move much slower. There's no admission fee; it's simply the most direct, and most crowded, walking route between Venice's two best-known landmarks.

The Mercerie carry the heaviest foot traffic of any route in Venice, and between roughly 10am and 6pm the narrow stretches move at a shuffle. Early morning, before the shops open, is the only time the street can be walked at a normal pace -- and the only time the 1310 mortar relief and the paving stone below it can be looked at without standing in someone's way.

Shops keep conventional retail hours and most close by early evening, after which the route is quiet and lit but has little left to look at beyond the architecture.