At night, Venice becomes a different city. The calli empty out, the shops close, and the noise gradually fades until all that remains is the sound of footsteps and water against the fondamenta. Only then do the façades finally come into view—and so does the light, which during the day often goes almost unnoticed.
After sunset
During the day, it is difficult to stop: there is always someone walking past, a boat pulling in, a group suddenly getting in the way. After dinner, the same streets seem completely different. A single streetlamp, a sottoportico, a lit window on the second floor: sometimes that is all it takes to make a photograph.
There is no need to go where everyone else goes. I often find the best images in overlooked places: an ordinary bridge, an empty fondamenta, the entrance to a palazzo. These are places that no one immediately recognises, and that is precisely what makes them interesting.
The light
Venice at night is never evenly lit. There are only a few sources of light, small and far apart, with large areas of darkness in between. This is what makes it so interesting to photograph.
A streetlamp illuminates part of a wall, light enters beneath a portico, slips across a bridge, breaks apart on the water. Everything else remains black, and that is fine: deciding what to leave out is just as important as deciding what to show. Often, the shadow is the most important part of the frame.
The colour changes dramatically too. Just after sunset, the warm artificial lights stand out against the blue of the sky, which for me is the most beautiful combination. Later, the sky darkens and the contrast becomes harsher, almost theatrical.
The water
In Venice, light also comes from below. The canal gathers streetlamps, windows, signs and fragments of buildings and gives them back distorted and trembling. A building appears twice in the same photograph: once as it is, and once as the water bends it.
With a long exposure, the effect becomes even stronger. The surface of the water turns silky, details dissolve and and points of light become streaks. Sometimes the reflection is more interesting than the building that produces it, and then the reflection itself becomes the subject.
The architecture
Venice is one of the most photographed cities in the world. St Mark's Square, the Doge's Palace, the Salute, Rialto, the Grand Canal: we have seen them all before, in paintings, photographs and films, and now in thousands of Instagram stories. Anyone photographing here has to contend with all of this.
Night helps create some distance. You remove something from the frame, leave half a palazzo in darkness, focus on a detail. Attention shifts away from the monument itself and towards the way it occupies the space around it.
Taking your time
With a tripod and exposures lasting several seconds, you stop shooting instinctively. You choose your position, watch the light, wait for a boat to pass or for someone to leave the frame.
Anything that moves either disappears or leaves a trace. A person crossing a campo during a long exposure becomes almost transparent, the lights of a boat turn into a line, and the water loses its solidity. In these photographs, time itself becomes visible.
You only need to move a little
You do not need to go far. Usually, moving just a few calli away from the main routes is enough. Dorsoduro, Castello and Cannaregio are very different from one another, but even San Marco changes considerably once the bars and restaurants close and the crowds have gone.
Knowing the city is useful above all because it tells you when to be somewhere. The same fondamenta may have nothing to say at ten o'clock and become beautiful half an hour later, when a vaporetto passes or a window lights up. You have to wait—and sometimes you have to come back.
A less obvious Venice
This is what interests me most: night does not make Venice more romantic; it makes it less legible. Colours and details disappear, some buildings emerge while others are lost in the darkness, the water no longer has a clearly defined edge, and the space becomes harder to understand.
Photographing Venice at night means working precisely on this threshold: between what the light reveals and what the darkness leaves us only to imagine.