The French philosopher Michel de Certeau was an astute observer of cities and their inhabitants. His image is a compelling one: a city's walkers writing a urban text – or better still from my perspective as an art historian, painting a picture, step by step, stroke by stroke – of a city they cannot see. Yet, as even the most casual visitor to Venice knows, tracing out the thicks and thins of the Venetian urban landscape is a difficult task. The narrowest streets are sometimes major thoroughfares through the city; and, often one's path terminates in a dead-end or a watery canal. In Venice, walking in the city is always a fraught task. Indeed, this was purposefully so: Venice was, as the eleventh-century chronicler Giovanni Diacono put it, ‘not founded by shepherds as Rome was, but by rich and powerful people,’ who were fleeing rampaging Visigoths, Huns, Ostrogoths, and Longobards. The inhospitable swampy site had been expressly chosen over any placid open pasture for the very fact that it was difficult to reach and difficult to inhabit. Early modern writers on Venice such as Marco Antonio Sabellico and Giovanni Botero punctuated their descriptions of the urban fabric with repeated mention of the many bridges that might connect two islands – or could be blocked off.