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 […]