Before the biennale crowds and gondola rides, Venice’s waterways were the stage for something far more violent: the guerre dei pugni (“wars of the fist”), ritualized street battles between the city’s two great working-class factions. A Public Domain Review collection gathers the paintings and engravings that documented the brawls, alongside historian Robert C. Davis’ account of why ordinary workers fought so hard over “seemingly ordinary neighborhood bridges.”

  • Two factions: the Castellani (“red shrimps”) — shipbuilders from Venice’s east — against the Nicolotti (“shadows”) — fishermen from the west — marked by red and black clothing and fighting caps
  • The battagliole sui ponti (“little battles on the bridges”) ranged from boxing matches to “enormous, prearranged wars” fought for hours before tens of thousands of spectators
  • Fists and cudgels were the primary weapons; knives and stones were banned by authorities trying to keep the disorder “orderly enough” — a safety valve letting artisans pummel their grievances out without tearing the city apart
  • Fights crowned popular champions, spawned new slights, and fueled the next canal-side brawl; men and boys were often injured, sometimes killed
  • Even Venice’s origin myth was partisan: the archipelago supposedly founded by the land-based genta da terra and sea-based gente da mar, with stick battles reported as early as around 800 AD
  • By the seventeenth century the pugni were a hallmark Venetian amusement and a Grand Tour staple; the last great battaglia was staged in 1705 — interest faded, Castellani shipbuilders were lost to the Turkish wars, and passions found new outlets in regatta rowing
  • The artists: Joseph Heintz the Younger’s Ponte dei Pugni scenes (1670s), Giacomo Franco’s engraving (ca. 1610), Domenico Rossetti, Domenico Lovisa (1717), and Alessandro Piazza’s Battaglia dei Pugni on the Bridge of San Barnaba

The images are all of a type: sturdy bodies swarming a bridge’s arch, crowds leaning from windows and filling gondolas, combatants toppling into the canal still swinging. The festival attitude is universal — it spills over the railing-less bridges and into the water below.

Today the Ponte dei Pugni survives mostly as a name and a set of carved stone footprints. The brawls themselves live on only through the artists who jostled alongside them.