VGB Blog
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.
The most common concern parents have about bringing children to Venice is that the city will not be child-friendly. No playgrounds (or very few), lots of bridges to carry pushchairs over, a complex street network that seems designed to confuse adults let alone children, and the general assumption that culture-heavy destinations are better suited to […]
Venice is, in its most fundamental character, a walking city. There are no cars, no bicycles, no motorbikes, no wheeled transport of any kind in the historic centre. Everything and everyone moves on foot across the 400 bridges that connect the city’s 118 islands, through the network of calli (streets), sotoporteghi (covered passageways), campielli (small […]
Venetian cuisine is one of the most underestimated regional food traditions in Italy — overshadowed in the popular imagination by the pizza of Naples, the pasta of Bologna and the simplicity of Tuscan cooking, despite being arguably more distinctive than any of them. This is partly a problem of geography: Venice’s food culture is genuinely […]
The tourist Venice and the real Venice are the same city separated by about 500 metres. The tourist route runs from the train station to St Mark’s Square via the Strada Nova and the Rialto — a corridor of extraordinary monuments, gift shops and tourist restaurants through which millions of people pass each year without […]
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 […]