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: […]