Before crowds jostled for biennale parties and gondola rides, Venice’s waterways witnessed scenes of an even more violent kind — “La Serenissima” this was not. Factional divides ran deep, and were frequently expressed (if not settled) in street combat. Even Venice’s origin myth was partisan: the archipelago is said to have been founded by the genta da terra (from Byzantine Heraclea) and the gente da mar (from the Venetian Lagoon). The earliest reports of stick battles between the two groups date to soon after their supposed arrival around the year 800. By the Renaissance period, working-class Venetians’ loyalties were, if anything, more entrenched. The Castellani faction, known also as the “red shrimps”, was largely made up of shipbuilders from Venice’s east. The core of the Nicolotti, or the “shadows”, were fishermen from the west. When they clashed in the streets to fight for the possession of a bridge — as they did often, on Sundays and holidays — the Castellani and Nicolotti showed their partisan loyalties with red and black clothing and fighting caps.

The battagliole sui ponti, or “little battles on the bridges”, ranged from boxing matches to mid-sized brawls to “enormous, prearranged wars . . . battled out for hours before tens of thousands of spectators”, writes historian Robert C. Davis. These boisterous, violent clashes were part of a long history of Venetian civilian battles, staged around (and sometimes spilling into) the city’s winding waterways. Fists and cudgels were the primary weapons — hence the name guerre dei pugni, or wars of the fists — though agitators threw stones and drew daggers. Men and boys were often injured as they sparred for control of one or another of Venice’s several hundred bridges. Sometimes they were killed. Each fight crowned new popular champions, spawned new slights and new battle stories, and fueled the next canal-side fistfight’s contrivance.

Putting life and limb on the line for what Davis calls “seemingly ordinary neighborhood bridges” begs an explanation, and he offers several. For one, bridges were a natural platform for factional fights. They were the literal liminal spaces between neighborhoods, whose insular identities had once been defined by the geographic boundaries of Venice’s islands. Bridges also naturally channeled the pugni to the bridge’s arch and prevented the burlesque from devolving into an all-out brawl. Counterintuitively, keeping the disorder of the battagliole orderly enough was one of the key challenges of Venetian governance: that meant banning knives and stones and punishing instigators who tried to provoke all-out riots. All to allow the city’s artisans to pummel their grievances out in relative safety.

Of course, bridges also simply offer a good view: for combatants, for spectators, and ultimately for artists. By the seventeenth century, the ritualized violence of the battagliole had become one of Venice’s hallmark amusements. Their popularity produced, and was reinforced by, written, painted, and printed records: some from Venetians, others by or for the sake of foreigners (Venice had, by then, become a staple stop on the Grand Tour).

Images of the pugni are all of a type: these pictures swarm with sturdy bodies, the bridge a confusion of fists and bare arms. The crowds converge at the image’s midpoint, framed by the narrow walkways and buildings lining the canal. Spectators lean out of windows, fill gondolas, and reach into the fray. Combatants grapple, brace, and topple into the water still swinging. While it’s more or less clear who is fighting and who is just watching, the festival attitude is universal: it spills over the railing-less bridges and into the water below.

By the seventeenth century, the reputation of the pugni had started to outpace the pugni proper. The last of the great battagliole was staged in 1705, and the clamor of several centuries of street fights dimmed soon after. Maybe, Davis writes, the Venetian public had simply lost interest; maybe the loss of Castellani shipbuilders to the Turkish wars had upset the “traditional equilibrium” between fighting factions. Maybe Venice’s partisan passions had been redirected into regatta rowing. But today, the closest we can come to the mayhem of the guerre dei pugni is through the eyes of the artists who jostled alongside them.