Getting lost in Venice is easy. All visitors who have tried to find an address (street name + house number) are well aware of this, but so are those who have tried, using Google Maps, to reach somewhere outside the usual tourist routes.
Using Google Maps to navigate in Venice is very difficult. Very narrow alleys, where sometimes two people cannot walk side by side, which are located in the middle of tall buildings, cause the GPS signal to bounce off the walls, and the detected position can be wrong even by several tens of meters. The result is that you may be directed down a dead-end alley, often ending up in a canal.
Furthermore, the numbering of the historic center of Venice is very rare in the world. Venice is made up of 416 islands, connected by 436 bridges, and is divided into six districts. In each district the street numbers are unique, they start from the center of the district and increase progressively, street after street, up to the last number. For example, the famous Doge’s Palace is located in San Marco, 1, while the La Fenice theater is located in San Marco, 1965.
Sometimes businesses also indicate the street name in the address, but this is not a required option, even if it would help a lot those who have to find a place.
In 2005, the municipality of Venice published a document on its official page to explain the “Structure and coding standard of addresses” distinguishing between the “street system” and the “island system”.
The insular numbering was standardized in Venice on 1 July 1841. It was adopted from the old Austrian civic numbering on 1801, and it took around 40 years to be completed.
This means that for almost 200 years getting lost in Venice was considered normal, at least until August 8, 2019, when Google published a news related to Live View in its blog: “There’s nothing like exploring a city on foot–it’s a great way to take in the sights and sounds of a new place. But it can be hard to know exactly which direction to go. With a beta feature called Live View, you can use augmented reality (AR) to better see which way to walk. Arrows and directions are placed in the real world to guide your way. We’ve tested Live View with the Local Guides and Pixel community over the past few months, and are now expanding the beta to Android and iOS devices that support ARCore and ARKit starting this week.”
It was a “Beta” version that a small group of Local Guides had been trying in secret for months, and all the magazines immediately started talking about it.
The official version is released on October 1, 2020 (A new sense of direction with Live View) and for a while everyone asked for news, even here in Connect, then it almost seems that no one has talked about it anymore, probably because few have needed to use it.
If you haven’t needed it yet, then the time has come for you to visit New York, Hong Kong, or Venice, or one of the many medieval cities of Italy, made up of narrow alleys, arcades, galleries.
At that moment you too, like I did, will think: “Lost in Venice? Follow the arrow!”.
What about you?
Have you ever needed to use Live View?
- If yes, where have you used it and how was your experience?
- If the answer is No, did this article intrigue you? So what are you waiting for? Try it and come back here to tell us about your experience. Enjoy yourselves.