Category: Events

International Women’s Day is observed around the world every year on 8th March to celebrate the value of women and to remember their struggle of many decades for peace, justice, equality and development.   International Women's Day is a great occasion to observe one of our destinations from another point of view. There are so many places telling stories of women and that demonstrate how the city of Venice is "feminine": an urban space that has made the boundaries between houses and squares, between public and domestic places less marked, allowing the women's life to be firmly intertwined with the urban context and make it visible. And women, like men, by their side or by defending themselves from them, have struggled, worked and loved to build a city with many voices. If we pay attention to the urban asset, it reserves many surprises… In the old rural heart of the city we find women engaged in agricultural work, women who took the sea route, who founded convents and hospitals, institutes to accommodate needy and pilgrims; we see them freely dispose their wills in notarial and testamentary deeds; the exercise of trades in a now extended and urbanized Venice, lacemakers, embroiderers, midwives, singers, sorcerers, and cultured and refined courtesans; not to mention strong figures of dogaresse or queens. Venetian women of the modern age were freer and intellectually independent than in other Italian realities, precisely because they were daughters and expressions of the peculiarity of Venice and its institutions, a city that had always known how to relate in a relaxed and open way with diversity, a city without walls, a melting pot of peoples and cultures, which welcomed a cosmopolitan, multifaceted and lively society. Women are therefore seen as ingenious and creative presences in many fields of the city's long