Venice is struggling to handle overtourism.
A ban on cruise ships and restrictions for tour groups is alive.
Contribued by Jens Hoffmann
On the program.
Entrance fees for day-trippers during high-season periods and a lot of hazzle.
Ferries to smaller islands offer additional calm discoveries to go away from Piazza San Marco and Rialto Bridge. and experience the canal-filled city.
Along the way, you might find upstart grand hotels, gourmet osterias with pizzas for over 50 Euro, new cocktail bars and a semi-secret convent garden recently opened to the public.
Second, winter — with its early darkness, famous fogs and reduced crowds — provides breathing room and deepens the mysteriousness of Venice’s narrow passageways and centuries-old buildings.
One upside to visiting this coming summer: an ambitious new art center, Palazzo Diedo, will reopen in a restored 18th-century building next year.
Bucketlist:
The seaside gardens of Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, a 16th-century church, are open to the public.
Il Palazzo Experimental and Nolinski Venezia, two new hotels, contain bars that are reinvigorating Venice’s cocktail scene.
Pesaro art museum exhibits offers works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Marina Abramovic and other artist.
Torcello island is home to Santa Maria Assunta, a mosaic-filled Byzantine basilica.
Getting around
Pure Italia, prosecco, olive oil, no cars. no scooters.
Venice’s six central sestieri are a pedestrian-friendly maze where you can walk nearly everywhere.
Alternatively, vaporetti ply the major waterways and service outlying islands like Murano and Burano.
Tickets for vaporetto are purchased from machines at many vaporetto stops or from tabacchi convenience stores.
First day
A view of a lush garden with orange flowers and wooden trellis.
An orange-pink building with a dome and towers rises in the background.
A lovely green space debuted this fall when the garden of Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, a 16th-century church, opened to the public for the first time.
Tucked behind a door in an alley called Calle dei Frati on Giudecca — a long island forming the south border of Venice proper — the newly renovated and replanted gardens are filled with cypresses, olive groves, fruit trees, trellised vines, and hundreds of flowers and plants.
In winter, the marquee attraction is the early sunset view over the Adriatic Sea.
A cafe serves espresso abd hot chocolate.
Other half-hidden gems around Giudecca are CREA, an arts complex in a boatyard with several exhibition spaces, and the boutique of Fortuny, a century-old fabric manufacturer, in a gated industrial complex.
Near the Scuola Grande di San Rocco — a historic building filled with works by the Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto — the stylishly angular and modern-minded restaurant serves several dishes featuring burned or smoked ingredients.
These include fish and steaks, flambéed scallops with lumpfish roe and charred lemon and smoked sole with porcini mushrooms.
Fans of forest flavors might like the foamy mushroom soup larded with shaved white truffle, pork jowl and a poached egg, while seafood lovers should consider grilled octopus tentacles on potato foam.
The interior of a bar with plush red seating, shelves lined with books and a decorated ceiling.
A bartender wearing a white suit and a bowtie prepares a drink.
A pair of impressive new hotel bars are reinvigorating Venice’s cocktail scene.
Centrally located in a palazzo that once held the Venice stock exchange, on Calle XXII Marzo, a street of luxury boutiques, is Nolinski Venezia.
The hotel contains a velvety bar lined with some 4,000 books, from “Picasso: Between Cubism and Classicism” to “Yacht Interiors.”
Peruse one with a Dandolo cocktail (chocolate-infused bourbon, white vermouth and Earl Grey tea; €25). More playful and (intentionally) 80s-kitsch, the plush Experimental Cocktail Club — housed in Il Palazzo Experimental hotel, in the Dorsoduro neighborhood — updates the Negroni with the Monsteroni (Gin, Campari, Vermouth, Coconut oil and a cordial of stout ale).
A man spreads out a sheet of colored, patterned fabric on a large wooden table inside a fabric showroom.
A statue of a group of men in various poses, all looking somber.
The statue is in a museum by the door.
Rodin’s Burghers of Calais at Ca’Pesaro.
Long before the French billionaire François Pinault made his big 21st-century real-estate acquisitions — the opulent Palazzo Grassi townhouse and the former customs house known as Punta della Dogana — to showcase his contemporary-art collection, and even before the 1950s opening of Peggy Guggenheim’s remarkable modern art trove, the white Baroque mansion on the Grand Canal known as Ca’ Pesaro was the showcase for Venice’s artistic avant-garde.
Opened as a modern-art museum in 1902, it today houses a permanent collection that includes Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais,” Klimt’s “Giuditta II” and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, along with contemporary art.
Farther down the canal, Ca’ Rezzonico museum occupies another aristocratic white Baroque mansion.
Once home to the poet Robert Browning, the edifice today enfolds sumptuous 18th-century period rooms decorated with ceilings painted by Tiepolo and Venetian cityscape canvases by Canaletto.
La Bottiglia
Chomp cicchetti
Like croissants in Paris, cicchetti — small savory bar snacks — abound in Venice, and no one agrees who does them best.
One favorite spot is Adriatico Mar, a snug wine bar on the north edge of the Dorsoduro sestiere with its own boat dock.
Amid beamed ceilings and antique wooden tables, devotees munch small sandwiches filled with ingredients like formadi frant cheese (with caramelized onion and grape jam) and pork shoulder (with mustard and radicchio).
A five-minute walk leads to rustic-cool La Bottiglia, where a young team assembles overstuffed focaccia sandwiches, including one with porchetta, caramelized onions, pumpkin cream and gorgonzola.
Buy Venetian
The scent of pulp fills Legatoria Polliero, one of the small independent shops near Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, a red-brick Franciscan church containing paintings by Bellini and Titian.
A multi-paneled painting in a church, with various religious scenes and intricate gold-colored carvings around each panel.
The Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo
Rather than brave the crowds of Piazza San Marco, consider Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a picturesque square in the Castello neighborhood that is bordered by two monumental Renaissance buildings.
The Scuola Grande di San Marco, once home to a religious brotherhood and now a hospital, features a dramatic white neo-classical facade and a grand interior hall with coffered ceilings, huge paintings (including some by Tintoretto’s son Domenico), displays of bygone medical devices, and thousands of centuries-old illustrated anatomical and medical books.
Next door, the soaring red-brick Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo contains a finely detailed panel painting by Bellini.
Dine in Castello
Opened in 2023, Pietra Rossa restaurant shines like a beacon of epicureanism from the quiet residential Castello neighborhood.
The simple space — wooden tables, checkerboard floor — belies the sophisticated kitchen, which employs Adriatic seafood, produce from the restaurant’s garden and a Japanese kamado charcoal grill to delicious effect.
Starters include numerous bocòn, one-bite concoctions like a slightly cooked oyster with watermelon gel and olive oil or langoustine with pork bits and porcini mushroom, while the substantial mains range from chunks of grilled amberjack in potato cream to sliced steak with roasted vegetables.
Stay local with Dorona Criterio skin-contact wine from Ca’Savio, a peninsula in the lagoon.
A wine bar with wood beams on the ceiling and shelves of wine on the walls. A person stands behind the bar and a few patrons are at tables, glasses in hand.
An impressive natural-wine scene is gathering steam in the hip Cannaregio district. Opened in 2021, La Sete contains ample wood — ceiling, shelves, chairs, tables — and some dozen wines by the glass.
Outdoor heat lamps allow drinkers to enjoy the night air while sipping, say, a light, juicy red called Trallallà (€5 per glass) by Agricola La Venta winery.
Estro Pane e Vino is a bright, cheerful little bar with canal views and shelves loaded with some 200 types of wine — including Le Guaite di Noemi Amarone (€6 per glass), an easy-drinking red Valpolicella. And for music fans, Bea Vita often has D.J.s animating the evenings as customers sip offerings like Bibby (€6.50), a fruit-forward white made from Vespaiola grapes.
Lazy Sunday:
Ghetto Venezia
A dubious distinction: The word “ghetto” was first coined in Venice as a reference to the enclosed neighborhood created in 1516 to house its Jewish population.
Today the Ghetto area is still home to several centuries-old synagogues, two of which can be visited with a ticket from the Ghetto Venezia information office.
The largest Venice synagogue, it is lined with wooden benches and contains an upper gallery for women.
More finely decorated, the Sinagoga Levantina (Levantine Synagogue) was built over the 16th and 17th centuries and contains neo-classical stonework, hanging silver censers and an elaborately sculpted wooden pulpit.
A view of a church’s exterior, a tower in the rear of it. Water with reflections of the church is in the foreground. There are trees on the edge of the water.
Santa Maria Assunta
12 p.m. Sail to Byzantium
A scenic 40-minute vaporetto voyage through the lagoon islands takes you to Torcello, probably the first island to be inhabited. En route, the line 12 vaporetto passes San Michele (a cemetery island where the composer Igor Stravinsky is buried) and Murano (famous for glass-blowers) before a stop at Mazzorbo, home to the fancy Venissa restaurant and osteria. Get off at Burano and catch line 9 to Torcello.
Bellissimo.
We love Venice.
