VGB Blog
Most visitors know the lagoon through three names: Venice, Murano and Burano. Yet the lagoon holds many more islands, and three of them offer something quite different from the postcard Venice: a seaside island with a film-festival past, a residential island facing Venice across the water, and a flat farming island where the city’s prized […]
Venice architecture is a thousand-year conversation between East and West, shaped by one stubborn fact: everything had to be built on a lagoon. Byzantine domes, Gothic palaces, Renaissance churches, Baroque landmarks and daring modern interventions all stand within a few kilometres of each other, often within sight of the same canal.
Few places on earth were built for two people the way Venice was. There are no cars to shout over, only water slapping against stone. The bridges are made for pausing halfway across. The light at the end of the day turns the whole city the colour of honey. If you are searching for a […]
Most visitors to Venice never turn left at the railway station. They follow the crowds towards Rialto and St Mark’s, and miss a corner of the city that changed the vocabulary of the entire world. Ten minutes on foot from Santa Lucia, through a low covered passage off the Fondamenta di Cannaregio, you step into […]
Venice does not need help being romantic. The light is soft, the water never stops moving, and every footstep echoes off old stone. What the city does need, if you are planning to propose here, is a little strategy. Venice is one of the most visited places on earth, its lanes are narrow, and its […]
The honest answer is: yes, partly, but not in the way most headlines suggest, and not on a timeline that should worry anyone planning a trip. Venice is not gradually vanishing beneath the waves in real time. It is the product of three separate physical processes — two of them a century or more old […]
Roughly twenty million visitors pass through a historic centre that houses around fifty thousand residents — a ratio unlike almost anywhere else in Europe. That imbalance has produced, alongside the extraordinary art and architecture Venice is actually famous for, a small but persistent economy built entirely around the gap between what a first-time visitor knows […]
The spritz is now one of the most popular cocktails in the world. It appears on menus from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, it has its own emoji in several phone keyboards, and Aperol — its most internationally recognised version — has achieved a level of global ubiquity that would have astonished the Venetians who invented […]
Every year in late August and early September, Venice — which for the preceding weeks has been managing the logistical and human pressures of peak tourist season — undergoes a transformation. The focus of the city shifts southward to the Lido, the long barrier island that separates the lagoon from the Adriatic. The Palazzo del […]
Every city of sufficient age accumulates its shadows — the stories that explain the things that cannot quite be explained, the legends that attach themselves to old buildings like moss to stone, the rumours that persist long after anyone can verify their origins. Venice, which has been accumulating history since the 5th century and which […]
Venice and solo travel are made for each other. This is not the conventional wisdom — the conventional wisdom says Venice is a city for couples, for romantic weekends, for the honeymoon gondola ride at sunset. And Venice is absolutely all of those things. But it is also, and perhaps more profoundly, a city for […]
The first thing to say about Venice and accessibility is this: Venice is significantly more accessible than most visitors with limited mobility expect, and significantly less accessible than an ideal city would be. Both of these facts are important, and this guide addresses both honestly.