A Week In Venice
Travel Tips for Venice
There are no busses, cars, rickshaws, or bikes in Venice! Anywhere you need to go will be reached on foot or by boat.
You can pay €2 (as of October 2023) for certain gondola rides across the Grand Canal. They last three minutes, but you’ll be in a gondola without paying €80 or more for a personalized half hour ride!
Pizza in Venice isn’t made using wood ovens so it will taste different than most other places in Italy.
Many Venetian streets are incredibly narrow. You won’t get used to your personal space being invaded and bumped many times while walking.
Venice has direct ferry services to the islands of Murano and Burano. Both are gems to visit, especially for photographers!
Our Travels In Venice
We were still debating how much we’d enjoy Venice as we arrived at the Venetian train station. Venice definitely came with a reputation. Tiny crowded streets meant we couldn’t dodge smokers or protect our belongings. Tourist traps and scams are so common that we warned about them multiple times. A dominant seafood scene meant fewer restaurants for our resident vegetarian to enjoy. You’d think that pizza would be an easy option, right? Nope! No wood fire ovens allowed in Venice because the oven might also cook the buildings. Rain was forecast on half the days we would travel in Venice. That and more caused us a lot of worry before arriving. We were both happily blown away by how much we enjoyed traveling to Venice!
Venice hooked us the moment we left the train station!
You step out onto a plaza bordered by the most unique city we’ve ever seen.
A canal filled with boats of all shapes and sizes ran along the plaza. On the opposite side of the canal, was the main city of Venice. It was a solid wall of brick buildings built straight on the water. Everything seemed to be floating in place. The pedestrian bridges leaping the canal into Venice were filled with people capturing photos and vendors hoping to capture them. Once we crossed the bridge we got to experience how much fun getting “lost” in Venice can be!
Every street was a narrow corridor lined by shops, restaurants, and my favorite, local pubs. It felt like every door between the endless brick walls lead to something that we wanted to see or try. Some doors were floating just above the water line. Every wall looked antique and grungy. Ever done a corn maze? Think of it kind of like that but with pastas, pizzas, and mold. And absolutely no greenery anywhere. We even found a building that split a canal in half! This building and the bridge I took the shot from were just featured in the 2023 film Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part1! We’re basically one step removed movie stars. Discovering new bridges, canals, and docks didn’t get old until we started feeling the weight of our packs. Crossing the city exploring for photos has its perks, but so does watching a movie warm in bed. That urge sent us across town in a totally different direction to our hosts home.
We spent our first full day in Venice outside of Venice in the small island town of Burano.
A thirty minute ferry ride took us to the most colorful town you can image - every building is a different vibrant color! Like Venice, canals wind through Burano, but the majority of vendors here only sell lace based clothing. At one point Burano was the most famed lace producer in Europe so it’s a long running tradition. Did we buy any? Nope, out of budget. But we sure were tempted! A day in Burano is best spent wandering the streets for free to find the next rainbow row. The entire town is eye candy, but it is missing affordable food options. We stuck to our grocery store lunch watching boats pass by while fighting off over eager pigeons. It was a solid day trip, but the day wasn’t over.
Before we made it home we passed by a church advertising a concerti of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to be performed in the church by night. Fun fact, we’re big fans of the series Chef’s Table which uses the Winter movement in its theme song. Couldn’t pass up hearing that live! We bought tickets straight away and loved every second of it! Most classical performances are held in an auditorium or concert hall, but church acoustics should get way more credit. Exploring a Venetian night afterwards was like living a film noir sequence. We had a nice light gloss of wet pavement to make the mood perfect thanks to a light drizzle throughout our entire visit. Most Venetian streets became eerily quiet but never scary. Making our way through them felt like being in a brand new city. However, we were also on the hunt for two of Venice’s most famous culinary takes – cicchetti and Select.
Cicchetti (pronounced she-keh-tee) is like a Venetian take on Spanish tapas except cheaper, even smaller, and cicchetti leans heavily into seafood of all kinds. Pieces regularly used creamed cod, squid ink, or tuna among other more common ingredients like cheeses and salami. You know, everything delicious that Chandni can’t eat! Luckily cheese and fruit based cicchetti are just as good! Each piece costs about one to two euros but tastes like it should be about four to five. Granted, we started by trying cicchetti at Osteria Al Squero and Cantine del Vino già Schiavi which are both famously delicious, but even when we chose random bars for cicchetti like Corner Pub (a new fav of ours) they still hit the spot. We got mighty thirsty thanks to all that eating so we made sure to down a Select spritz with them.
Select is a local Venetian aperitif that’s similar to Campari. If you enjoy a fine Campari or Aperol spritz then you’ll love a Select spritz. We were also both huge fans of a Hugo spritz which is a St. Germain and Prosecco drink that may as well be liquid magic! We ordered so many of those everywhere in Venice. Can’t say we expect to see either drink outside Italy so we added them to our list of Italian food and drink to salivate over.
A few major landmarks we didn’t explore were the iconic Basilica di San Marco (Saint Mark's Basilica) and Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace) around Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Square). Both are postcard iconic buildings in the heart of Venice having been featured in everything from James Bond to Assassin’s Creed. We’re usually great about mixing in major tourist sites into our itineraries but this time they didn’t much appeal to us. Sure, we went to appreciate their architecture and enjoy the St. Mark's Square, but Venice offered so much more without an entry fee. We got caught up in wandering the city instead. We weren’t wandering because we had nothing to do, we were wandering because it was our favorite thing to do. That’s part of how we got a two euro gondola ride.
Venice offers a public transit gondola across the Grand Canal at a few spots. For €2 you can join up to eleven others and take your nearly free gondola ride across the Grand Canal! If you want a gondola ride to yourself then expect to pay €80 or more for half an hour. Riding a few different public gondolas a few times is a way better bang for your buck. Save your money. Eat more cicchetti.
Venetian sunrises and sunsets were mostly spent above the Grand Canal on the Ponte dell'Accademia (Accademia Bridge). From there you can see all boats sailing towards the Adriatic from the Grand Canal. It’s a beautiful sight, but the down side of October is that you’re stuck shivering in the cold for sunrise and probably in the rain by sunset. I experienced both so I promise it’s so worth braving the elements! And I think that’s about how Venice can be summarized. No matter drizzly weather or eerie surroundings, there was never a time in Venice when should be discomforts actually made us uncomfortable. All of our worries came true but none of them fazed us. We loved the the experience that is Venice.
It’s a messy and delicious spectacle, and one city we were surprised to have enjoyed as much as we did. We can’t wait to return!
