Venice airport transfers and travel guide

Things to see in Venice

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  St Mark’s Square and Basilica

  San Marco, city centre

  Piazza San Marco is the principal public square of Venice — Venetians call it simply la Piazza, and a remark usually attributed to Napoleon calls it the drawing room of Europe. St Mark’s Basilica closes its eastern end. The present church was begun around 1063, and its domes and vaults were slowly covered with gold-ground mosaics. The four bronze horses above the entrance came from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade; the originals have been kept inside since 1974. The campanile was rebuilt in 1912, as it was and where it was, after the old tower collapsed in 1902.

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  Doge’s Palace

  Piazzetta San Marco

  The Doge’s Palace held the whole Republic under one roof: government offices, a jail and the residence of the elected Doge, behind a Venetian Gothic façade of pink and white stone. First built in 810 and rebuilt from 1340, it has been a museum since 1923. The Chamber of the Great Council, 53 metres long and 25 metres wide, is one of the largest rooms in Europe and carries Tintoretto’s Il Paradiso, said to be the widest canvas painting in the world. A covered bridge built shortly after 1600 — the Bridge of Sighs — leads across to the New Prisons.

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  The Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge

  Through the centre of the city

  The Grand Canal runs 3.8 km in a reversed S from the lagoon near Santa Lucia station to the basin at San Marco, and is between 30 and 90 metres wide. More than 170 buildings line it, most of them from the 13th to the 18th century. Because the city’s traffic runs along the canal rather than across it, only one bridge spanned it until the 19th century: the Rialto. The present single stone arch, designed by Antonio da Ponte, was begun in 1588 and finished in 1591, with two rows of shops along its covered ramps.

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  Murano

  Lagoon island, 1.5 km north of Venice

  Murano is a group of islands about 1.5 km north of Venice, linked to one another by bridges. In 1291 every glassmaker in Venice was ordered to move his furnace here, away from the city’s mostly wooden buildings, and the island kept a near-monopoly on fine glass for centuries, refining millefiori, milk glass and gold-threaded aventurine. The Glass Museum fills the Palazzo Giustinian, and the church of Santa Maria e San Donato keeps a twelfth-century Byzantine mosaic pavement. Pauly & C., founded in 1866, is the oldest glass factory still working on the island.

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  Burano

  Lagoon island, 7 km from Venice

  Burano lies 7 km from Venice, about 45 minutes by vaporetto from St Mark’s Square, and it is the island people photograph: small houses in strong flat colours, which owners may only repaint in the shades the authorities allow for that plot. Women here began making needle lace in the 16th century; the trade declined, then revived when a lacemaking school opened in 1872, and the Lace Museum now stands on Piazza Baldassare Galuppi. The church of San Martino has a conspicuously leaning campanile and a Crucifixion painted by Giambattista Tiepolo in 1727.