Suggestions for Venice/Vicenza
 

We are going to Venice and Vicenza for 1 week. Any recommended Hotels, Places to eat and sights to see. Also any of the above to avoid? <BR> <BR>Thanks

Well Sue, my darling wife no-one out there is responding to us. There are reportedly 100 billion people using the web. Perhaps no-one's been to Vicenza :-) At least it won't be crowded!

Dear Sue: <BR> <BR>Do two specific searches on this forum. "Venice hotels" and "Vicenza". Venice hotels--because otherwise you'll have hundreds of postings--and just Vicenza because "Vicenza hotels" may not turn up anything. Good luck. <BR>

A couple restaurant recommendations in Venice: <BR>we had great pizza in Venice at Pizzeria Bora Bora, not far from the Rialto bridge, but on the San Marco side. We had an awesome dinner at a small place called Alla Vedova. They had no menu, just a counter display of antipasto, and a few pasta dishes the waitress would recite. We asked the waitress to bring us a selection of antipasto and ended up eating extremely well and at a reasonable price. For more of a splurge, Da Fiore is one of the best seafood restaurants I've ever been to. Its expensive and you definitely need a reservation. <BR> <BR>As far as sights in Venice, the obvious ones, the San Marco Basilica and the Doge's palace are both great. We also loved the Accademia and the Guggenheim collection.

I have actually stayed in Vicenza, but only because the hotels in Verona were booked during opera season, and Vicenza was the next city up on the train. I don't remember where we stayed--the nice folks at the tourist office set us up with a two-star. Vicenza is nice, but it's more of a busy shopping town than anything historical. I'd certainly have rather stayed in Verona, which is one of my favorite towns in Italy.

In Venice we had lunch at Harry's Bar. Kind of expensive, but the service was impecable, the food was delicious, and the restaurant ambience was tops. I would recomend it for lunch; for dinner it seemed to be tough to get in without reservations.

Well, somehow I've never made it to Vicenza, but my friends who've been there have found it interesting, and I do want to go there to see the Palladio architecture. If that's why you're going there, you might want to seek out a good book on Palladio (preferably at the library, given the price of art books) which will give you far more info than any travel book. A couple that come to mind are the ones by Rudolf Wittkower, James Ackerman, Robert Tavernor, and Bruce Boucher. The latter two are a bit glossier than the former. Sorry that I have no personal experiences to share.

I will put in a plug for visiting the island of Torcello, which was a major population center early in Venice's history and preserves a magnificent church, vividly decorated inside, and little else. It takes a while to get to but I find it very atmospheric. Burano, where the women make lace, is also interesting. I recently purchased a book here in the US which showed where great art was viewable in public places in Venice and I then concentrated on churches having Giovanni Bellini works. I recommend this book.

A couple of months back I visited Vicenza, which was high on my wish list since I am an architecture student. The Palladian buildings: villas, theatre, basilica, were well worth the trip. These monuments mixed well with the curiously high-end shops and stores. Rich people lives there, obviously. By night the town was quiet; I spent some time watching a big group of Filipino(?) maids having a get-together on the steps of Basilica Palladiana. It was quite a surreal place, actually.