La Diga

The Diga is a seafront causeway whose raised embankment records successive phases of Grado's defences, from Venetian timber works to its stone form.

Why it matters

The causeway served as a rampart protecting the old town from the sea. From the mid-18th century, when the Venetian Republic drove a palisade of wooden piles into the clay to shield the castrum from storms, the barrier was raised, rebuilt and extended by every power that held Grado. Even after the ground level of the ancient quarter was lifted by a metre, the sea periodically flooded calli and squares — a reminder of the historic centre's vulnerability to flooding.

What to notice

The causeway links the Spiaggia dell'Imperatore on the east with the Costa Azzurra beach on the west, curving with the island's shoreline so that the view alternates between open Adriatic and the silhouettes of the lagoon. The base beneath the balustrade still shows the "dorso d'asino" — donkey-back profile — that Austrian engineers built in 1885, when Grado belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Viennese administration had already renamed the walk the Promenade. Hotels and villas turned their facades toward this waterfront during Grado's resort decades; the extension of the walk as far as the Costa Azzurra was completed only in 1934, requiring the diversion of the canal that once joined the harbour to the open sea near today's Auditorium Biagio Marin.

Context and history

The sequence of builders traces Grado's political history in stone. Venice built the first wooden barrier in the mid-1700s as a defence for the poor fishing town it then governed; the French period replaced the palisade with a stone embankment; Austria constructed the present hump-backed foundation in 1885 and gave the walk its first cosmopolitan vocation as a Promenade for the growing Habsburg seaside resort; and Italy, after 1918, adapted the structure into the full sea-walk of the interwar decades, finishing the western stretch in 1934. After the Second World War the final adjustments turned it wholly into the promenade of today, dedicated to Nazario Sauro, the Istrian sailor. The causeway links the seafront and the historic centre.