Overview to Venice: Travel Guide and Tourist Information
- Venice Information
- Eating & drinking in Venice
- Night life in Venice
- Getting around in Venice
- Things to do in Venice
- Where to stay in Venice
- Venice street map
Venice rises out of the water like Botticelli’s Venus, an achingly beautiful and peculiarly delicate sight. One of the most historically rich cities in Italy, it's studded with a host of unmissable monuments and truly unique sights.
Perhaps the most iconic image of Venice - immortalized, like the equally breathtaking Rialto Bridge, by Canaletto - is its bell tower, the 'Campanile di San Marco'. Originally built as a lighthouse, it now stands guard over the city and its people.
The tower looks down on St Mark's Square, one of the best-known features of Venice, and surely the most striking square in Europe. Admiring it, you’ll be in good company, as Napoleon himself once described St Mark's as ‘the finest drawing room in Europe’.
Yet neither of these sights can properly prepare you for the sumptuousness of the Basilica di San Marco. Home to the city’s patron saint, with its riot of colorful mosaics to the fore, it's one of the most elaborately decorated churches imaginable.
Another of the city’s truly unmissable sights is the Doge's Palace, the 'Palazzo Ducale'. First established in the ninth century, it has been home to many Doges down the centuries and acted as the city’s seat of power and government.
From the outside, the palace is a symbol of Renaissance Venice’s grandness and opulence. Inside, visitors are dazzled by the Grand Chamber and the Doge's apartments, a series of ever grander and more decorative rooms full of artwork.
Away from San Marco, with its plethora of unmissable sights (and hordes of tourists), the city gets arguably even more interesting. The areas of San Polo, Santa Croce and the former Jewish ghetto of Cannaregio are at once baffling geographically and endlessly fascinating. And this is the point: it’s the unique layout of the city (rather than any architectural or historical treasures) that’s the real star of the show:
Its canals and waterways bustle with boats, gondoli and traghetti. Its labyrinth of narrow alleyways echo with footsteps and disembodied voices, eerily distorted by the inescapable presence of water.
The city has a wonderfully dilapidated feel. Its palaces and impossibly grand houses huddle together, their walls swelling and bubbling with damp as the city, Canute-like, tries to defy the rising tides of the increasingly frequent 'acqua alta' (floods).