VGB Blog
There is no vessel more associated with Venice than the gondola. It appears on every postcard, in every film set in the city, in the imagination of every visitor before they arrive. It is simultaneously the most iconic image in Venetian tourism and, for many visitors, the experience about which they have the most uncertainty: […]
One day in Venice is enough to fall in love. Two days is enough to begin to understand. The difference between a 24-hour visit and a 48-hour visit to Venice is not simply a matter of more sights — it is a qualitative change in what the experience can be. With two days, you can […]
There is a museum in Venice that most visitors to the city never find. It sits on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere, three minutes’ walk from the Accademia and five minutes from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Its facade — one of the finest examples of Venetian Baroque architecture, begun by Baldassare Longhena and […]
There are two kinds of visitors to Venice. The first goes to the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s Basilica, queues, marvels, photographs, and moves on. The second goes to the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Venice is, by almost any measure, one of the great cities of the world. But it is also a city of 7.5 square kilometres, built on islands, surrounded entirely by water. Its hinterland — the broad, fertile plain of the Veneto stretching westward and northward from the lagoon to the Dolomites — is not part […]
There are two ways to spend a morning in Venice. The first is to join the flow of visitors moving from the station towards St Mark’s Square — through the Lista di Spagna, across the Scalzi bridge, along the Strada Nova — in a procession that reaches the Piazza by mid-morning and disperses into queues […]
There is no wrong time to visit Venice. This is one of the few travel clichés that is actually true — the city rewards visitors in every season, and each period of the year offers a version of Venice that is impossible to experience at any other time. The fog-softened silences of January. The blossom-scented […]
Most visitors to Venice know that Murano, Burano and Torcello exist. They appear on every tourist map, they feature in every guidebook, and the boats that serve them depart throughout the day from the Fondamente Nove and from San Zaccaria. But there is a significant difference between knowing these islands exist and actually understanding what […]
There is a particular quality to the light in Venice in the hour before sunset. It has been painted by Canaletto, Turner and Monet. It has been described by Henry James, Jan Morris and John Ruskin. Photographers travel from across the world to capture it. And yet all of these attempts — however skilled, however […]
It is one of the most common questions in travel planning, and in Venice it is particularly pointed: do I book a private guided tour, or do I explore on my own?
Venice is in a paradox. It is one of the most visited cities on earth — welcoming somewhere between 25 and 30 million visitors a year into a historic centre with a resident population of fewer than 50,000 people — and it is also one of the most fragile. The same qualities that make it […]
There are cities with great art, and there are cities that are themselves works of art. Venice is rare among the places in the world that belong to the second category — a city where the architecture, the paintings, the sculptures and the urban fabric itself constitute a single, continuous artistic achievement that unfolded over […]