Every design for Mestre

Across the lagoon from Venice, at the mainland end of the Ponte della Libertà, lies Mestre, the place where most of the city's people actually live. Its name is so bound up with the Venetian mainland that it is often used for all of it, from Carpenedo to Favaro Veneto, though Mestre itself was a comune of its own until it was joined to Venice.

The town sits on the flat Venetian plain, a few kilometres from the edge of the lagoon and a little further from the historic city, where roads and railways converge on their way to Venice. It began in the early Middle Ages as a checkpoint on the routes inland, served as a frontier stronghold guarding the lagoon, and after the Second World War grew fast and untidily alongside Marghera. Around the old town, home to the Palazzo della Provvederia, the Marzenego splits into two branches before running on as the Osellino to the lagoon.

Growing up here means a childhood of trams and buses, of afternoons in the Parco Piraghetto or the Parco Alfredo Albanese, of bike rides out to the Forte Gazzera, and of crossing the long bridge to Venice and always coming back across it again.