Underpass: Sotoportego

Sotoportego or Sottoportego it is a handing, a gape, a public transit area, opened under private construction in order to leave a space for communication between public areas.

Giuseppe Tassini in Curiosità Veneziane so defines it:

Sottoportico o Sottovolto is, as you know well, a stretch of road that passes under some building .

As well as for Calli, the Venetian State imposed to private property to leave a passage between the buildings to free passage to pedestrians, so the narrow streets and sotoporteghi became public use, but they were a legacy that private donated may have the right to build and then to lose as little as possible of private space, leaving streets so narrow that in some cases you can only move one at a time.

A special case is that of the Sotoportego del Tragheto in San Canciano where to give access to the building on the Rio dei Santi Apostoli the sotoportego insists on the entire length of the first building.

Many sotoporteghi are very old, such as the thirteenth-century Corte Seconda del Milion, although the public interest in 800 in the stress on the court were opened other two arches at the side of the old one and it was opened a new sotoportego, towards Campo Santa Marina, to give vent to the public leaving the Teatro Malibran just rebuilt.

Well as the Sotoportego de le Acque, of the waters, is well known to Venice because in this place existed, as Tassini says, one of those workshops, we now call coffee, and who were called in ancient times workshops from the waters.