5 Days in Venice

Come to Piazza San Marco around 8am, when the only people around are delivery boats, cleaners and pigeons. Napoleon is supposed to have called it the drawing room of Europe, and it does feel like a room: long arcaded buildings on three sides, the Basilica on the fourth, and the Campanile standing alone in the middle.

Walk down to the Piazzetta by the water, between the two granite columns brought from the East in the 12th century, one topped by the winged lion of St Mark and the other by St Theodore, the city's first patron saint. Executions used to take place between them, and superstitious Venetians still won't walk through. Look up at the Torre dell'Orologio, the clock tower from 1499, where two bronze figures known as the Moors strike the bell every hour.

St Mark's Basilica was the doge's private chapel, built to hold the body of St Mark, which two Venetian merchants smuggled out of Alexandria in 828, the story goes, under a load of pork so the Muslim guards wouldn't search it. The church you see was rebuilt from 1063 on the plan of a Byzantine church in Constantinople, and over the next centuries the Venetians covered it in gold mosaics, more than 8,000 square meters of them, and in marble and treasures brought home from the East.

Pay a little more to climb to the museum and the terrace over the square. Up there are the four bronze horses of St Mark, which Venice took from Constantinople when the Fourth Crusade sacked it in 1204. The originals are inside, copies stand on the terrace, and the view down over the piazza is one of the best in the city. The Pala d'Oro, a golden altarpiece set with almost 2,000 gems, is behind the high altar.

The pink and white Doge's Palace was the doge's home, the parliament, the courts and the prison of the Venetian Republic all at once. Climb the Golden Staircase to the council rooms, covered in paintings by Tintoretto and Veronese, and stand in the Great Council Hall, one of the largest rooms in Europe, where up to 2,000 noblemen met to vote. Tintoretto's Paradise along one wall is among the biggest paintings on canvas in the world. Along the frieze above are portraits of the doges, with one painted out in black: Marino Faliero, beheaded for plotting a coup in 1355.

The route ends across the Bridge of Sighs, built around 1600-1603 to link the palace to the new prisons. The name came much later, from Lord Byron and the Romantic writers, who imagined prisoners sighing at their last view of Venice. The most famous prisoner, Giacomo Casanova, escaped through the roof of the palace's own cells, the Piombi, in 1756.

Caffè Florian opened under the arcades of the square in 1720, which makes it one of the oldest cafés in the world, and it looks it: small rooms of mirrors, red velvet and painted panels where Casanova, Goethe, Byron and Dickens all sat. In the afternoon a small orchestra plays outside, competing with the one at Quadri across the square.

It's expensive, and there's a music surcharge of a few euros per person at the outdoor tables while the orchestra plays. Once is worth it. For a cheaper version of the same coffee, stand at the bar inside.

The bell tower of St Mark's is almost 99 meters tall, and a lift takes you to the top. On 14 July 1902 the original tower simply collapsed into a pile of rubble, killing nobody except the caretaker's cat. Venice rebuilt it "where it was and as it was" and reopened it on 25 April 1912, St Mark's day.

From the top you see how Venice really works: the islands packed together, the Grand Canal curving through, the lagoon all around and, on a clear day, the Dolomites on the horizon.

At sunset, take vaporetto line 1 from San Marco up the Grand Canal to Piazzale Roma, or the other way round. It's the slow line, stopping at almost every landing, and it's the cheapest, best tour in Venice. Some 170 palaces line the canal, built over six centuries by the families who ran the Republic, each one trying to outdo its neighbors, from the Gothic lace of the Ca' d'Oro to the baroque Ca' Rezzonico.

Try to get a seat at the front or back of the boat, outside. You'll pass under the four bridges of the Grand Canal, Rialto among them, and see the lights going on in the palaces.

There's been a market at Rialto for a thousand years. The Erbaria sells fruit and vegetables, many of them from the farm island of Sant'Erasmo, and the Pescaria, the fish market under a neo-Gothic hall on the Grand Canal, sells what came out of the lagoon and the Adriatic that night: cuttlefish still black with ink, spider crabs, tiny gray shrimp and, in spring and autumn, moeche, soft-shell crabs caught just after they shed their shells.

You won't be cooking, but this is the best place to see what Venice eats and to learn the names you'll find on menus later. Come before 10am, when the restaurant owners do their shopping.

For centuries the Rialto Bridge was the only way to cross the Grand Canal on foot. The wooden bridges before it burned, sagged and in 1444 collapsed under a crowd watching a wedding procession, so the Republic held a competition for a stone one. Michelangelo and Palladio are said to have sent designs; the job went to Antonio da Ponte, whose single arch was finished in 1591 and has stood ever since.

Cross it once for the view down the canal from the top, then go back down to the waterfront on the San Polo side, the Riva del Vin, where wine barrels were once unloaded.

Lunch in Venice is best done standing up, in a bacaro, a small wine bar where you point at cicchetti, little bites on toothpicks or slices of bread, and drink an ombra, a small glass of wine. The name means "shade": wine sellers once followed the shadow of the Campanile across the square to keep their barrels cool.

Start before 1pm: most of these bars close in the middle of the afternoon and on Sundays. The lanes behind the market are the classic crawl. All'Arco, run by the same family for decades, is many Venetians' favorite, with sandwiches made to order (mornings only, closed Sundays). Cantina Do Mori claims to date from 1462 and has the copper pots and dark wood to back it up. Cantina Do Spade, open since 1488, is around the corner, and Al Mercà is a tiny kiosk on a square where everyone drinks standing outside. Have two or three things in each, at 2-4 EUR a piece, and move on.

Walk ten minutes west to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, a huge Franciscan church of plain red brick that hides one of the great paintings of the Renaissance. Look straight down the nave and Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (1518) blazes red and gold over the high altar, framed by the arch of the choir screen as if the building was made around it.

Titian himself is buried here, in a grand 19th-century tomb, and across from him is a white marble pyramid with a door half open and mourners walking in. It's the tomb of the sculptor Antonio Canova, built to a design he had made for a Titian monument that was never carried out. Only his heart is inside.

Behind the Frari is the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the headquarters of a rich charitable brotherhood. Between 1564 and 1588, Jacopo Tintoretto covered its walls and ceilings with more than 50 paintings, the life of Christ downstairs and the Old Testament above, and it's often called Venice's Sistine Chapel.

Upstairs, pick up one of the mirrors they hand out and use it to look at the ceiling without breaking your neck. The Crucifixion in the small room next to the great hall is the one people come for: enormous, crowded and dark, and Tintoretto's own favorite.

Ten minutes south is Campo Santa Margherita, a long square that's Venice's answer to a student quarter. In the morning there's a small fish market and kids playing football, and by evening the bars around it fill with students from the nearby university, locals and the few visitors who find it.

Order a spritz here. It's a Venetian drink: Austrian soldiers in the 1800s asked for their Veneto wine "spritzed" with water, and the bitter liqueur came later. Venetians make it with Select, a bitter created in Venice in 1920, rather than Aperol, which is from Padua.

The Gallerie dell'Accademia holds the best of Venetian painting from the 14th to the 18th century, in the buildings of an old church, convent and charitable school by the Accademia bridge. Venice saw the world in color while Florence saw it in line, and here you can watch that happen: Giovanni Bellini's calm Madonnas, Giorgione's mysterious Tempest, Titian's last, almost abstract Pietà, and Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi, which was meant to be a Last Supper until the Inquisition objected to the drunks and dwarves in it, and Veronese simply changed the title.

Don't miss Carpaccio's cycle of St Ursula, and his and Gentile Bellini's huge paintings of 15th-century Venice, which show the city looking almost exactly as it does today.

A few minutes west of the Accademia, the Squero di San Trovaso is one of the very few boatyards left where gondolas are built and repaired, in wooden sheds that look like a mountain chalet. A gondola is still made by hand from eight different woods, and it's built slightly lopsided, so that it goes straight when the gondolier rows from one side.

The best view of it is from across the canal, where the Cantinone già Schiavi, a wine shop and bar also known as Al Bottegon, serves some of the best cicchetti in town, with creamy baccalà and tuna and leek on bread. Take your glass and plate outside to the canal, like everyone else.

The American heiress Peggy Guggenheim bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, a palace on the Grand Canal that was never finished beyond the ground floor, in 1949, and lived in it with her paintings and her dogs for thirty years. Her collection is the best of 20th-century art in Italy: Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Kandinsky, Pollock, whom she discovered, and Max Ernst, whom she married.

It still feels like a house. Go out onto the terrace on the canal, where a bronze rider with his arms spread, Marino Marini's Angel of the City, greets the boats, and into the garden, where Peggy is buried next to her dogs.

The great white dome at the mouth of the Grand Canal is Santa Maria della Salute, "Holy Mary of Health". The plague of 1630-31 killed about a third of the city, and the Senate vowed a church to the Virgin if it ended. It did, and Baldassare Longhena spent half a century building this one on more than a million wooden piles. Every 21 November, Venetians still cross a temporary bridge of boats over the Grand Canal to give thanks, and eat a mutton stew called castradina.

Walk on to the very tip of Dorsoduro, the Punta della Dogana, the old customs house where ships unloaded, now a contemporary art space for the collector François Pinault. From its point you look across at San Marco on one side and San Giorgio on the other.

Walk back along the Zattere, the long, sunny quay on the wide Giudecca canal, where Venetians come for their evening stroll. Halfway along is Gelateria Nico, open since 1937 and famous for the gianduiotto: a block of hazelnut chocolate gelato drowned in whipped cream. Eat it on the floating terrace over the water while ships and ferries pass a few meters away.

From the Zattere, take vaporetto line 2 across to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the white church that faces St Mark's across the water. Andrea Palladio designed it from 1566, with a temple front of columns that looks like nothing else in Venice, and inside hang two late paintings by Tintoretto, including a dramatic Last Supper.

The real reason to come is the bell tower. A lift takes you up the 75-meter tower for what many Venetians say is the best view in the city: San Marco, the Doge's Palace and the whole basin of St Mark's straight in front of you, with no queue and none of the crowds of the Campanile.

In 1291 the Republic moved all its glassmakers out of the city to the island of Murano, partly to keep fires away from the wooden houses of Venice and partly to keep the secrets of the trade under control. Glassmakers were treated like nobility and forbidden to leave, and those who fled abroad could be hunted down. Murano glass has been the island's business ever since.

See the Glass Museum, which tells the whole story, from Roman glass to chandeliers, and the church of Santi Maria e Donato, with a 12th-century mosaic floor of peacocks and eagles. Then watch a glassblower at work in one of the furnaces. On the way, the boat stops at San Michele, the walled cemetery island where Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ezra Pound and the poet Joseph Brodsky are buried.

Line 12 takes you across the open lagoon, past fish farms and marshes, to Burano, a fishing island where every house is painted a different bright color. The story is that fishermen painted them so they could find their homes in the fog. Whatever the reason, families still need permission from the town to repaint, and only in the approved colors.

Burano is also the island of lace. The Lace Museum shows the delicate needle lace that women here made for the courts of Europe, and a few still demonstrate it. Buy a bag of bussolà or esse, the island's ring- and S-shaped butter biscuits, from a bakery on the main street. A wooden footbridge links Burano to Mazzorbo, a quiet island of vegetable gardens and the Venissa vineyard, where the rare Dorona grape grows.

Burano's dish is risotto di gò, a risotto made with the broth of gò, the goby, a small lagoon fish too bony to eat any other way. Trattoria Da Romano, open since 1900, is the place, with walls covered in paintings left by the artists who ate there. It's closed on Tuesdays and should be booked.

The other classic is Al Gatto Nero, run by the same family since 1965 and known for its fish and handmade pasta. It's closed on Mondays. Both are worth the trip to the island on their own.

The line 9 shuttle from Burano takes five minutes to Torcello, where Venice began. In the 7th century this was the main town of the lagoon, with several thousand people, and its cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta, was founded in 639. Then the canals silted up, malaria came, and people moved to the islands that became Venice. Today barely a dozen people live here.

Walk the path along the canal to the cathedral, past the Devil's Bridge, a little stone bridge with no railings. Inside, the west wall is covered by a 12th-century mosaic of the Last Judgment, with the damned in flames and skulls with worms crawling through their eyes, and over the apse is a tall, sad Madonna on a field of gold. Outside sits a stone chair known as Attila's Throne, though it has nothing to do with Attila. Ernest Hemingway stayed at the island's inn in 1948 to write and shoot ducks.

Come back to Fondamente Nove and walk into Cannaregio, the northern district where most Venetians actually live. The long, parallel quays of the Fondamenta degli Ormesini and the Fondamenta della Misericordia are lined with bars and small restaurants that spill out onto the water, and they're the liveliest place in the city on a warm evening.

Al Timon serves wine and cicchetti to people sitting on a boat moored outside, and Vino Vero is the place for natural wine. Have dinner at a bacaro here, and walk home along the dark canals.

On 29 March 1516 the Republic ordered the Jews of Venice to live on one small island in Cannaregio, where a copper foundry had stood. The Venetian word for a foundry was geto, and the most common explanation is that this is how the word "ghetto" entered the world's languages. The gates were locked at night and guarded by Christian watchmen, whom the Jews themselves had to pay. With no room to spread out, the community built up instead, and the Venetian Ghetto still has the tallest houses in the city, up to seven or eight stories.

Five synagogues, two of them built by the German community and the others by the Italian, Levantine and Spanish-Portuguese ones, are hidden on the upper floors and can be visited on guided tours from the Jewish Museum. Napoleon tore down the gates in 1797. On the wall of the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, bronze reliefs by Arbit Blatas remember the Venetian Jews deported in 1943-44.

Five minutes north, on the edge of the lagoon, is Madonna dell'Orto, Tintoretto's parish church, where he is buried among ten of his own paintings.

A tramezzino is a triangular sandwich of soft white crustless bread, and in Venice it's overstuffed until it bulges: tuna and egg, prawns, ham and mushrooms, baccalà. It came from a café in Turin in the 1920s, and the name is usually credited to the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, but Venice made it its own.

Walk from the Ghetto along the Strada Nova, Cannaregio's busy shopping street, to Bar Tiziano on Salizada San Giovanni Grisostomo, which has a counter full of them. Have two with a glass of wine or a spritz at the bar, the way locals do, for a few euros.

After lunch, stop at Santa Maria dei Miracoli, a tiny church covered inside and out in colored marble that Venetians choose for weddings, then walk on to the vast Dominican church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, "San Zanipolo" to Venetians. This was where the funerals of the doges were held, and 25 of them are buried here, in tombs that get grander through the centuries. It's the Westminster Abbey of Venice, and far emptier than St Mark's.

Outside on the square stands one of the great equestrian statues of the Renaissance, the bronze of the mercenary general Bartolomeo Colleoni, designed by Andrea del Verrocchio in the 1480s. Colleoni left the Republic a fortune on condition that his statue stood in front of St Mark's. Venice took the money and put it in front of the Scuola di San Marco instead.

Venice's power came from its ships, and its ships came from the Arsenale, the state shipyard behind high brick walls in Castello, traditionally founded around 1104. At its height it employed thousands of workers and built galleys on something like an assembly line: in an emergency, the story goes, it could turn out a ship in a day. Dante described it, boiling with pitch, in his Inferno. Its galleys were part of the Christian fleet that beat the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571.

The great Renaissance land gate is guarded by stone lions, two of them looted from Athens in 1687, one with Viking runes carved on its side. Most of the Arsenale is still navy property, but parts open during the Biennale. On the way, the small Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni has Carpaccio's paintings of St George and the dragon, and outside the Biennale season the Naval History Museum next to the gate tells the story of the Republic's fleet.

Every year, the Biennale fills the Arsenale and the gardens at the eastern end of Castello with art or architecture from around the world, in national pavilions built by each country. The 2026 art exhibition, In Minor Keys, runs until 22 November 2026, and the Architecture Biennale follows from May 2027. If you're here then, give it the rest of the afternoon.

The rest of the year, the gardens and Via Garibaldi, the widest street in Venice, made by filling in a canal under Napoleon, are where the eastern end of the city lives: washing hung over the street, a market, old men on benches and kids on bikes. It's the least touristy walk in Venice.

Yes, it's a cliché and it's expensive. Do it anyway, once, at the end of the trip. A gondola glides almost silently, and it's the only way to see the smaller canals at water level, with the gondolier's call of oé echoing around the corners before he turns.

Don't pick the stand in front of St Mark's. Go to a quieter stazio, a gondola station, here in Castello or in Cannaregio, and ask for a route along the small canals rather than the busy Grand Canal. The price is fixed by the city: around 90 EUR for 30 minutes by day and more after 7pm, for the whole boat. A gondola takes up to five people, so share it if you can.

For the last night, book a proper Venetian fish dinner. Osteria alle Testiere, a few minutes' walk away in Castello, is tiny, serves the lagoon's fish with real care and has to be booked two or three weeks ahead. Across the Grand Canal in San Polo, Antiche Carampane, with its sign saying "no pizza, no lasagne, no menu turistico", is the other classic. Both are closed on Sundays and Mondays.

Start with sarde in saor and baccalà mantecato, then risotto al nero black with cuttlefish ink or a fish of the day, and finish with a tiramisu, which was born in the Veneto.