Rialto Fish Market (Pescheria)

The Pescheria di Rialto has sold fish on this bend of the Grand Canal since fish trading was formally authorised here in 1227 under the Republic's food authority, the Giustizia Vecchia. The current neo-Gothic loggia, with its red-pillared, open-air colonnade, was built in 1907 after earlier structures burned down. Each morning vendors lay out the day's catch -- moeche soft-shell crab, sardines, scampi, cuttlefish -- on marble slabs, continuing a trade that has run in this spot for close to a thousand years.