View of Dolo

Every June in the 18th century, Venice's noble families packed up and floated inland. They rode the Brenta, the canal that links the lagoon to Padua, aboard the burchiello, a gilded barge with mirrored cabins, heading for months of villa life away from the summer city. Dolo was a stop along that route, and Canaletto shows it here as a working town rather than a grand one. A lock let the barges climb between water levels, and mills turned beside the channel. He had recently come back to Italy after nearly a decade working in England, and this is a small canvas, barely 30 by 44 centimeters, not one of the wide Grand Canal views that foreign visitors bought from him. It is one of several pictures he made of this modest lock town on the Brenta.