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 […]