Building

How Venice Classifies, Regulates, and Uses Its Buildings

Venice contains 15,485 buildings within its historic center, each shaped by centuries of architectural tradition, planning policies, and contemporary pressures from tourism, depopulation, and heritage protection. Understanding how the city classifies, manages, and uses its buildings is essential for interpreting urban patterns, zoning decisions, and the residential decline documented in recent decades.

This page summarizes the building classification system used by the City of Venice, explains the planning and cadastre (Catasto) frameworks behind it, and presents quantitative insights into building types and uses—supported by building-level data gathered and verified by the Venice Project Center B25 team.

How Venice Classifies Buildings

Venice relies on an integrated system of architectural typology, functional-use categories, and urban-planning classifications. These come from municipal datasets, national cadastre records (Catasto), and the Variante per la Città Antica zoning plan.

1. Architectural Typology (Tipologia)

Architectural typology describes when and how a building was constructed. Venice’s typology codes classify each building by century and major use group:

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Code	Italian Description	English Meaning
R_PREOTTO	unità edilizie residenziali preottocentesche	Residential buildings pre-19th century
R_OTTO	unità edilizie residenziali ottocentesche	Residential buildings 19th century
R_NOVE	unità edilizie residenziali novecentesche	Residential buildings 20th century
NR_PREOTTO	non-residential pre-19th century	Non-residential, pre-19th century
NR_OTTO	non-residential 19th century	Non-residential, 19th century
NR_NOVE	non-residential 20th century	Non-residential, 20th century
SP_PREOTTO / SP_OTTO / SP_NOVE	special-use buildings	Special use (religious, institutional, civic)
ALTRO	other or unclassified	Other / not classifiable