The Bridge of Sighs is a famous Venetian landmark. With such a wonderfully romantic name, you no doubt expect it to be one of the many ornate bridges that cross the canals, a place to stop beneath a vintage street lamp and take a moment to watch gondolas drift along and the play of sunlight or moonlight on the  gentle blue waters. But in fact, the sighs in question are not those of misty-eyed lovers, but of convicts.

TheBridgeofSighsis an enclosed bridge, made of limestone, that was built to traverse the Rio di Palazzo and join together a prison and interrogation rooms of the doge’s palace. The view from the small, square windows of the city was the very last a criminal would see before incarceration.

It was English writer Lord Byron who named the bridge, back in the nineteenth century, when he wrote this stanza of Childe Harold:

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand;
I saw from out the wave her structure rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times, when many a subject land
Look’d to the wingèd Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.

Interestingly, there are several other bridges worldwide named ‘The Bridge of Sighs’. One such bridge is in Oxford, England, connecting two parts of the University. But it is the Venetian bridge that is the source of romantic legend: supposedly, if you kiss your lover on a gondola at sunset under the bridge as the air rings with the bells of St Mark’s Campanile, you will live happily ever after. Such a lovely idea – no wonder it formed the basis of a film, A Little Romance (1979), starringDiane Lane and Laurence Olivier, in which two lovers facing adversity in their union at every turn travel toVenice to cement their relationship beneath the bridge.

The bridge is visible from either Canonica Bridge or the Ponte della Paglia. But personally, I recommend seeing it from a gondola. At sunset. When the bells toll. As you pass underneath, look closely at the sculpted details, and seek out the one smiling face. Perhaps it is Cupid’s.