There is no such thing as ‘unknown’ Venice – the city is a compact whole, is comprehensively explored by all who stay there for more than a few days and has been more written about and talked about than any other city on earth. But you can escape from the area of most intense tourist pressure. This walk takes you as far as possible from the Grand Canal, among the rii (small canals) and campi (small piazzas) where you recover something of the original simplicity of Venice and see, in busy little streets and unfashionable palazzi and churches, reflections of the city’s magical encounters with the Byzantines, the Arabs and the Orient. Here is not the showy Venice of the picture-books. Here is the underlying strength of a city once renowned as the secure port, the centre of a fabulously rich economy and the base for daring enterprises.

Start: The Arsenale – see map. Take the unromantic and ever-available vaporetto from any station on the Grand Canal to the Arsenale, two stops east of St Mark’s. Follow the Rio dell’Arsenale into the dockyard. This is where Venice, in her halcyon era, built the galleys which subdued the Adriatic and spread her influence throughout the East. In the great warehouse, now the naval museum, you see the ornate barges of La Serenissima’s governors and vessels of many ages and lands, including a Chinese junk. Four stone lions of uncertain provenance (like the famous bronze horses of St Mark’s) guard the museum’s Renaissance gate.

Go west on Rio di San Francesco, sparing a few minutes for the church of San Francesco della Vigna, a clinically pure structure by Sansovino (1534), and continue across Rio di Santa Giustina for ½ km to Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo – in local dialect ‘San Zanipolo’. The church, a brick building, not pleasing to the eye, is the last resting-place of the Doges, rulers of Venice, and it has a fine frescoed ceiling by Veronese.

On this same campo stands a notable work of art, Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (1488). Colleoni, a freebooter and mercenary leader of Venetian armies, left a fortune to the state on condition that his statue should be erected in St Mark’s Square. The notoriously devious city fathers stuck to the letter of the bargain: they installed it at a remote St Mark’s, a scuola grande or charitable foundation of that name. You might look into this scuola grande, one of several in the city, as you cross Rio dei Mendicanti or ‘Beggars’ Canal’ and head west again to the pretty and fashionable little church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Its lovely inlaid marble facade covers a cosy pink and grey interior loaded with saintly images and paintings, a perfect summary of the style they call Venetian Renaissance.

Two blocks west, pick up the Rio di Santi Apostoli and in 300 m you are on the lagoon embankments, the Fondamente Nuove, at a crossroads of navigation. If you have had enough for one day, the Linea 5 vaporetto will take you east, back through the Arsenale canal and along the Giudecca canal (actually an arm of the sea), calling at various stations on Giudecca island and along the Dorsoduro (‘Hard Shoulder’) between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca strait. (This district is covered in the second walk, St Mark’s and Dorsoduro.)

Or you may take the westbound vaporetto to the main railway station, down part of the Grand Canal and across to the Giudecca again, thus completing the circuit of Venice. Or you may travel, as all Linea 5 vaporetti do, from the Fondamente Nuove to the isles of San Michele, Murano, Burano, Torcello and Sant’Erasmo. The last three are too much on top of a walking day, but the first two need not take more than an hour. On San Michele, five minutes from the Fondamente, 20thC celebrities are buried, including Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Ezra Pound. Murano, another five minutes in the boat, is a microcosm of Venice with its own mini-canals and toy bridges. The isle is entirely preoccupied with glass – glass-blowers’ workshops, glass museums and glass retailers adept at the glassy hard sell.

When you return from the islands, continue west on the sinistra or anti-clockwise boat (some go one way, some another) to the next stop, Madonna dell’ Orto. This out-of-the-way church, aggressively Gothic with a domed campanile, contains the tomb of Tintoretto. No artist covered a greater acreage of wall and ceiling in Venice and he is well-represented here. The church was half-ruined in the 1966 floods. Britain, responding more generously than any other nation to Venice’s despairing cries, rescued the church and devoted part of its Venice in Peril funds to a handsome restoration.

On leaving the church turn right along the rio and left over its wooden bridge. Corte del Cavallo (‘Horse Courtyard’) on the right before you cross is where Verrocchio had his workshop and where the horse of the Bartolomeo Colleoni statue was cast in bronze.

An attractive route back to the Grand Canal by the banks of the Misericordia and San Felice Canals and several little churches and campi worth looking at would take 20 minutes or so. A more interesting return is by Calle della Malvasia and Campo del Ghetto to the Guglie Bridge on the Cannaregio Canal. This takes you through the old Jewish quarter, the original ghetto, where you still find a synagogue and at least one kosher restaurant.

You come out beside Palazzo Labia, notable for its Tiepolo frescos and summer concerts, on the Grand Canal. The waterbus stop, 200 m to the east, is close to Palazzo Ven-dramin-Calergi, where Wagner lived and died. It is now the winter casino. The stop after that is Ca’ d’Oro (Casa d’Oro, ‘Golden House’), reputedly Venice’s most beautiful palazzo, with Mantegnas, Carpaccios, Titians and Giorgiones in its picture gallery. It dates from 1530.