Venice is one of the easiest big-city escapes from Milan: a direct high-speed train takes about two and a half hours, so a single day is realistic. The catch is that your day is built around the train timetable. Here is how to plan it, what to see, and the rules worth knowing before you […]

Venice has plenty of canals, but only one that everyone calls grand. The Grand Canal is the city’s main thoroughfare, a great reverse-S of water that cuts through the heart of Venice, and it is lined with some of the most remarkable buildings in Europe.

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.