Doing Justice to Venice -- How Much Time?
Mar 9th, 2010, 02:10 PM
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Doing Justice to Venice -- How Much Time?
I'm trying to piece together a September/October trip combining Sicily and Venice. I have a good handle on Sicily (something between 7 and 12 days should suffice) but am a bit lost still with Venice.
Without getting into details of our likes/dislikes, etc., for a good general introduction to Venice (and maybe nearby) should I allow 3 full days? 4? 5?
Without getting into details of our likes/dislikes, etc., for a good general introduction to Venice (and maybe nearby) should I allow 3 full days? 4? 5?
Mar 9th, 2010, 02:21 PM
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Hello NoFlyZone, if you have the time I would opt for the 5 days. There is so much to see in Venice and of course walking throughout Venice is so lovely as is having time to sit and enjoy a drink, some leisurely meals etc.
Mar 9th, 2010, 02:23 PM
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Without knowing your likes and dislikes and given that you think 12 days should suffice for all of Sicily, I'd say 2 days for Venice should be fine.
If it was my holiday, I'd say a week for Venice + day trips. Of course, I also would only do about a third of Sicily in 12 days.
I other words its really hard to guess without knowing your likes and dislikes and the total time you have.
If it was my holiday, I'd say a week for Venice + day trips. Of course, I also would only do about a third of Sicily in 12 days.
I other words its really hard to guess without knowing your likes and dislikes and the total time you have.
Mar 9th, 2010, 02:31 PM
#6
If time is no time concern and if you enjoy leisurely paced sightseeing, I think 3 or 4 full days would allow for a good general introduction to Venice alone. For the Venice lovers, a full 5 days probably isn't enough. For those who don't come under her spell, one full day would probably suffice.
I love Venice but have never spent more than 3 days there, which is enough to capture her essence, see lots of art (in the churches primarily), and decide whether you, too, have succumbed to her charms. Ultimately, the length of your stay will depend on how much you want to see and do there, and only you can answer that.
I love Venice but have never spent more than 3 days there, which is enough to capture her essence, see lots of art (in the churches primarily), and decide whether you, too, have succumbed to her charms. Ultimately, the length of your stay will depend on how much you want to see and do there, and only you can answer that.
Mar 9th, 2010, 02:34 PM
#7
My first real trip to Venice (I don't count a quick trip down the Grand Canal between trains), I spent six nights, and I certainly didn't run out of things to do. I spent one day visiting Murano and Burano, but I didn't day trip to the mainland.
Mar 9th, 2010, 02:42 PM
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We spent six days in Venice three years ago, and thought that we’d hardly scratched the surface. Returned for Christmas a year ago for a couple of months and we’ll return again this Christmas for eight weeks.
The longer you spend in Venice, the more you become engaged with this quite intimate town. Give Venice as much time as you can.
I wrote a trip report – click on my user name and you’ll find it. It’s full of trivia, and might give you a feel for how one can spend one’s time.
The longer you spend in Venice, the more you become engaged with this quite intimate town. Give Venice as much time as you can.
I wrote a trip report – click on my user name and you’ll find it. It’s full of trivia, and might give you a feel for how one can spend one’s time.
Mar 9th, 2010, 11:49 PM
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Some of the answer depends on your tolerance for being in crowds of tourists.
My own interest in Venice is entirely about painting, mosaic, meaning essentialy museums and church interiors, and architecture. Venice is extremely rich in these, so it is easy to spend days and days there and still feel that one has to return.
But if you are not that motivated, the ambience of Venice is so oriented toward mass tourism, that you may not want to linger. It is also expensive, and restaurants tend to be mediocre.
If you are the kind of tourist who arrives with a guide book looking to "do" the sights, the Michelin Green Guide is very good on telling you how many hours to alot for each sight.
My own interest in Venice is entirely about painting, mosaic, meaning essentialy museums and church interiors, and architecture. Venice is extremely rich in these, so it is easy to spend days and days there and still feel that one has to return.
But if you are not that motivated, the ambience of Venice is so oriented toward mass tourism, that you may not want to linger. It is also expensive, and restaurants tend to be mediocre.
If you are the kind of tourist who arrives with a guide book looking to "do" the sights, the Michelin Green Guide is very good on telling you how many hours to alot for each sight.
Mar 10th, 2010, 05:15 AM
#10
"tolerance for being in crowds of tourists.
" - I would certainly advocate avoiding the busiest months! I went in November, and even then the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark's Square could be packed. But it's easy to lose the crowds by walking just a short distance away from the most popular streets. I totally disagree that the "ambience of Venice is so oriented toward mass tourism" - there is mass tourism in the summer months, and when cruise ships are docked (WHY doesn't Venice ban the big ships???), but it doesn't affect the overall ambiance if you show a little initiative.
" - I would certainly advocate avoiding the busiest months! I went in November, and even then the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark's Square could be packed. But it's easy to lose the crowds by walking just a short distance away from the most popular streets. I totally disagree that the "ambience of Venice is so oriented toward mass tourism" - there is mass tourism in the summer months, and when cruise ships are docked (WHY doesn't Venice ban the big ships???), but it doesn't affect the overall ambiance if you show a little initiative.
Mar 10th, 2010, 05:23 AM
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Venice..that mecca for thievery and knowing HOW to make money...like they are even going to think about banning ANY ship full of possible spenders...dream on...
I would recommend at least three days BUT it depends on what you are interested in IMO..there are things in Venice I am NEVER going to spend my time seeing because they do not interest me in the least.
I agree it can get crowded and there's a REASON people flock to that city.
I would recommend at least three days BUT it depends on what you are interested in IMO..there are things in Venice I am NEVER going to spend my time seeing because they do not interest me in the least.
I agree it can get crowded and there's a REASON people flock to that city.
Mar 10th, 2010, 01:06 PM
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Why doesn't Venice ban the big ships?
It wants them. People who depart from Venice on the big cruise ships need to arrive ahead of time, or they linger after the cruise is over. They tend to be people who are both nervous travelers and big-spending shoppers -- so they fill up the 4 star plus hotels and they buy a lot of high-end goods.
That's an important contrast to the Fodor's budget traveler who stays in a b&b or rents an apartment and eats gelato and soaks up the atmosphere -- and never orders a Murano chandelier to send home or drops $600 on dinner for the family.
It's one thing to be without the crowds in Venice (or Tuscany, as described in a recent NYTimes articles about Tuscany-in-wintertime). It's quite another to be in a part of Italy where the local culture still thrives and has not been supplanted by foreign visitors with money. Mass tourism has done that to Venice, if when you go off season or find a corner away from the guidebook destinations. The economic life of Venice is solely tourism. It's a completely different feel if you go a half hour away. Try it sometime.
It wants them. People who depart from Venice on the big cruise ships need to arrive ahead of time, or they linger after the cruise is over. They tend to be people who are both nervous travelers and big-spending shoppers -- so they fill up the 4 star plus hotels and they buy a lot of high-end goods.
That's an important contrast to the Fodor's budget traveler who stays in a b&b or rents an apartment and eats gelato and soaks up the atmosphere -- and never orders a Murano chandelier to send home or drops $600 on dinner for the family.
It's one thing to be without the crowds in Venice (or Tuscany, as described in a recent NYTimes articles about Tuscany-in-wintertime). It's quite another to be in a part of Italy where the local culture still thrives and has not been supplanted by foreign visitors with money. Mass tourism has done that to Venice, if when you go off season or find a corner away from the guidebook destinations. The economic life of Venice is solely tourism. It's a completely different feel if you go a half hour away. Try it sometime.
Mar 10th, 2010, 01:18 PM
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There's a different Venice, if you can find the time to discover it. It does take some time, though.
Sunday 1 February, 2009, and we have a week to go. It's snowing – again – and we're a bit over it. We think that a sunny Venice would be nice. OK, so go in August, and stand in line for three hours to see the Doge's Palace, or cross the Rialto Bridge. But we like a Venice that we can walk around in without feeling intolerably crowded, so we had better just get over the cold.
So after eight weeks, how does it feel? We do feel connected, in a tiny way, but maybe as connected as outsiders can be. I've enjoyed a “guide book free” experience, discovering the city in reverse – see something, say a stone head between the paws of a carved lion – and then find out what it is all about.
We've wandered, with no particular destination in mind, finding odd things, an indoor skittle alley, the old gas works, the place where water was piped ashore in Venice in 1848, the prison, boat yards, the occasional church or notable sight. We've watched garbage boats, cranes lifting loads, guys driving mooring piles into the bed of a canal, mothers collecting little children from school, people restoring ceilings.
We've been elbowed by the boys leaving the Polytech in Cannaregio, given directions to befuddled visitors in Italian and English, stroked cats. We've spoken broken Italian and broken English to the girls in our local bar, walked through every door we fancied that looked even slightly inviting.
I'll quote from “Venice is a Fish” by Tiziano Scarpa – he puts it very well. “The first and only itinerary I suggest to you has a name. It's called: at random. Subtitle: aimlessly. ............... Getting lost is the only place worth going to.”
We've done a lot of that.
Sunday 1 February, 2009, and we have a week to go. It's snowing – again – and we're a bit over it. We think that a sunny Venice would be nice. OK, so go in August, and stand in line for three hours to see the Doge's Palace, or cross the Rialto Bridge. But we like a Venice that we can walk around in without feeling intolerably crowded, so we had better just get over the cold.
So after eight weeks, how does it feel? We do feel connected, in a tiny way, but maybe as connected as outsiders can be. I've enjoyed a “guide book free” experience, discovering the city in reverse – see something, say a stone head between the paws of a carved lion – and then find out what it is all about.
We've wandered, with no particular destination in mind, finding odd things, an indoor skittle alley, the old gas works, the place where water was piped ashore in Venice in 1848, the prison, boat yards, the occasional church or notable sight. We've watched garbage boats, cranes lifting loads, guys driving mooring piles into the bed of a canal, mothers collecting little children from school, people restoring ceilings.
We've been elbowed by the boys leaving the Polytech in Cannaregio, given directions to befuddled visitors in Italian and English, stroked cats. We've spoken broken Italian and broken English to the girls in our local bar, walked through every door we fancied that looked even slightly inviting.
I'll quote from “Venice is a Fish” by Tiziano Scarpa – he puts it very well. “The first and only itinerary I suggest to you has a name. It's called: at random. Subtitle: aimlessly. ............... Getting lost is the only place worth going to.”
We've done a lot of that.
Mar 10th, 2010, 02:28 PM
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Peter,
I know you have a conviction based on one trip to Venice that when people who've made many trips there post here about the absence of a thriving Venetian culture in Venice, we just still haven't tried hard enough to find it or get lost enough. I have pictures es of Venice without a single boat in the Grand Canal at 10 am on Christmas morning. And ats I petted. And garbage boats. I've bought hairspray on the Strada Nuova.
But if you spend a lot of time in Italian locales where there are no tourists, it is very striking how internationalized Venice is, how much ordinary local life has been pushed to the margins, how complete the colonization of the town is by visitors.
And it's a myth that if somehow you spend months or years there, this "other" Venice will emerge. For all sorts of reasons, Venice is no longer econonomically viable in the industrial age. It was the great luck of Venice, in fact, to have died so completely and to be so useless it wasn't modernized -- and therefore become a wondrous historical artifact. Sure people and cats live inside the museum. Sure somebody has to take out the garbage. They do it at the Alhambra too. Bruges. Lots of historic places. Not the same as a town still capable of forging its own future.
It's as important for people who go to Venice to observe that, ponder it, as it is for them to stroke the cat and occasionally get elbowed by a genuine Italian. It's a pity to me that Venice is not made a university town -- completely -- for the study of Byzantium, architecture, global warming studies -- and subsidized by the world so it could have a resurrection as something other than a place to "get lost". With all the treasures inside Venice, some in plain view, some just a step inside a doorway, I think it's close to a crime people go there to "get lost." Maybe if they paid a bit more attention to all the artistic achievement there, were encouraged to seek it out instead of just "wander" past it, looking for cats and schoolboys, it wouldn't "get lost" forever to the tourist forces that sadly it now is.
I know you have a conviction based on one trip to Venice that when people who've made many trips there post here about the absence of a thriving Venetian culture in Venice, we just still haven't tried hard enough to find it or get lost enough. I have pictures es of Venice without a single boat in the Grand Canal at 10 am on Christmas morning. And ats I petted. And garbage boats. I've bought hairspray on the Strada Nuova.
But if you spend a lot of time in Italian locales where there are no tourists, it is very striking how internationalized Venice is, how much ordinary local life has been pushed to the margins, how complete the colonization of the town is by visitors.
And it's a myth that if somehow you spend months or years there, this "other" Venice will emerge. For all sorts of reasons, Venice is no longer econonomically viable in the industrial age. It was the great luck of Venice, in fact, to have died so completely and to be so useless it wasn't modernized -- and therefore become a wondrous historical artifact. Sure people and cats live inside the museum. Sure somebody has to take out the garbage. They do it at the Alhambra too. Bruges. Lots of historic places. Not the same as a town still capable of forging its own future.
It's as important for people who go to Venice to observe that, ponder it, as it is for them to stroke the cat and occasionally get elbowed by a genuine Italian. It's a pity to me that Venice is not made a university town -- completely -- for the study of Byzantium, architecture, global warming studies -- and subsidized by the world so it could have a resurrection as something other than a place to "get lost". With all the treasures inside Venice, some in plain view, some just a step inside a doorway, I think it's close to a crime people go there to "get lost." Maybe if they paid a bit more attention to all the artistic achievement there, were encouraged to seek it out instead of just "wander" past it, looking for cats and schoolboys, it wouldn't "get lost" forever to the tourist forces that sadly it now is.
Mar 10th, 2010, 03:16 PM
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When we visited Venice in 1975, it was for three or four nights, as quite naive twenty-something tourists. In December 2006, it was for a week, and we visited the notable, the Baedeker “don’t miss this” sights – San Marco, Doges Palace, Rialto fish market, and really did not see Venice.
December ‘08 to February ‘09 gave us nine wonderful weeks, and we discovered a side of Venice that is hard to encounter in a short visit. Spoke broken Italian to a wood turner up to his knees in shavings, watched for half an hour while Polliero bound a book in his shop by the Frari, spent time watching a dredge fish rubbish out of the canal near the Tre-Arci bridge, spent an hour in the Ghetto, saw a performance of la Traviata. We spent ages talking with the lady in the linen shop in Calle Lunga San Barnaba and to the guy who does great photographs a couple of shops down from her.
We’re back there this Christmas for a couple of months, and I’m reading “Venice for Pleasure” by J.G. Links, written in the mid sixties, recently edited and re-published. He gives a re-interpretation of Ruskin, who he quotes frequently. Links’ language is frustratingly twee, but he gives a good insight into the architecture of Venice. It will make for some interesting walks and notable sights that are off the usual tourist trail.
We’ll view the ceiling of the Scuole San Marco, and find the patches of Romanesque architecture that Ruskin mentions. We’ll find the Corte Leon Bianco, the site of an inn behind the Pallazzo da Mosto that Corryat mentions in his 1610 book as giving good lodgings. Corryat is credited as introducing the table fork to England – a little piece of trivia.
I’m planning a trip to Chioggia via Pelestrina, to see the fishing fleet, and visiting Vignole, where real working people grow real vegetables, and I suppose there is more to Venice than meets the artistic eye.
And I guess that we’ll make some contribution to the survival of Venice by spending money there.
December ‘08 to February ‘09 gave us nine wonderful weeks, and we discovered a side of Venice that is hard to encounter in a short visit. Spoke broken Italian to a wood turner up to his knees in shavings, watched for half an hour while Polliero bound a book in his shop by the Frari, spent time watching a dredge fish rubbish out of the canal near the Tre-Arci bridge, spent an hour in the Ghetto, saw a performance of la Traviata. We spent ages talking with the lady in the linen shop in Calle Lunga San Barnaba and to the guy who does great photographs a couple of shops down from her.
We’re back there this Christmas for a couple of months, and I’m reading “Venice for Pleasure” by J.G. Links, written in the mid sixties, recently edited and re-published. He gives a re-interpretation of Ruskin, who he quotes frequently. Links’ language is frustratingly twee, but he gives a good insight into the architecture of Venice. It will make for some interesting walks and notable sights that are off the usual tourist trail.
We’ll view the ceiling of the Scuole San Marco, and find the patches of Romanesque architecture that Ruskin mentions. We’ll find the Corte Leon Bianco, the site of an inn behind the Pallazzo da Mosto that Corryat mentions in his 1610 book as giving good lodgings. Corryat is credited as introducing the table fork to England – a little piece of trivia.
I’m planning a trip to Chioggia via Pelestrina, to see the fishing fleet, and visiting Vignole, where real working people grow real vegetables, and I suppose there is more to Venice than meets the artistic eye.
And I guess that we’ll make some contribution to the survival of Venice by spending money there.
Mar 11th, 2010, 12:41 AM
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I didn't realize you had been before your nine-week stay. On my first visit to Venice for four days, I didn't go to inside the Doge's Palace, didn't visit the fish market, didn't walk over the Bridge of Sighs or take a gondola ride. I went to the scuolae, the Accademia, the inside of every church I could, Torcello, Burano, the Jewish Ghetto, the Strada Nuova, San Giorgio -- plus I saw the laundry boats, the students, the movie theater was still open then, art galleries, lawyers -- so you really shouldn't imagine that everyone who comes to Venice for the first time has your first time experience.
Apartment renters do help small property resist selling out to the hotels. Enjoy your upcoming stay at Christmas! When the city is so empty on the 25 and 26, the fragility of the native culture becomes quite poignantly visible, as young families arrive to visit the grandmothers who remain. One really wonders what will happen in 10 years. I don't think enough young people are moving in to replace those passing on.
Florian's is open on Christmas morning until 2pm, and I found it empty save for 3 people and highly enjoyable for that, as well as its perfect coffee. High mass in the Basilica is a blazing glory, and a midnight mass in S.M.G. dei Frari was a tiny congregation of Venetians listening to a six-year-ol girl sing Silent Night. (There is persepe there too.)
If you are going to Choggia, have your read this?
p://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/feb/07/venice-lagoon-public-trasnport
I like my Ruskin straight I think, and believe he was right about everything. I hope a ceiling you've viewed is Santa Maria Miracoli. But don't imagine that an artistic eye fails to see things other than art in Venice. It's the sentimental eye that doesn't.
I'm waiting for Franco to come here and chew me out.
Apartment renters do help small property resist selling out to the hotels. Enjoy your upcoming stay at Christmas! When the city is so empty on the 25 and 26, the fragility of the native culture becomes quite poignantly visible, as young families arrive to visit the grandmothers who remain. One really wonders what will happen in 10 years. I don't think enough young people are moving in to replace those passing on.
Florian's is open on Christmas morning until 2pm, and I found it empty save for 3 people and highly enjoyable for that, as well as its perfect coffee. High mass in the Basilica is a blazing glory, and a midnight mass in S.M.G. dei Frari was a tiny congregation of Venetians listening to a six-year-ol girl sing Silent Night. (There is persepe there too.)
If you are going to Choggia, have your read this?
p://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/feb/07/venice-lagoon-public-trasnport
I like my Ruskin straight I think, and believe he was right about everything. I hope a ceiling you've viewed is Santa Maria Miracoli. But don't imagine that an artistic eye fails to see things other than art in Venice. It's the sentimental eye that doesn't.
I'm waiting for Franco to come here and chew me out.
Mar 11th, 2010, 04:00 AM
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Hi NFZ,
As Truman Capote said, "Venice is a box of bon bons". Eat them slowly and savor each one.
The longer the better.
If you eat the whole box at once, you will get sick.
Enjoy your week in Venice.
As Truman Capote said, "Venice is a box of bon bons". Eat them slowly and savor each one.
The longer the better.
If you eat the whole box at once, you will get sick.
Enjoy your week in Venice.
