Or 40 minutes if like me you spend your whole time in Venice just a little bit lost.

We want to see both the monuments and the city/people.

Captainmorini - I have been told by fellow Fodorites that Hotel Flora is quite nice and not overly expensive and about five minutes from San Marco Square.

We enjoyed our stay at Hotel Flora last October. Here is the website http://www.venice-hotel.hotelflora.it/
Very charming and one cannot beat the location. I would venture out to guess that a March stay would be quite a bit less than the Euro 230 we paid for a double in early October.

Anna Roz

"We want to see both the monuments and the city/people."

And you will.

The closer you are to Piazza San Marco the farther you are from local life and the heavier the tourist crowds. In mid March crowds won't actually be terrible, though the weekends will still bring increased volume.

Cannareggio and Castello are quieter, with a stronger local flavor and fewer shops.

Short of getting a bad hotel (and these are actually not the norm in Venice) you really can't help but have a great visit.

I recognize I'm in the minority on this, but we did not enjoy the Hotel Flora. Our room was very noisy -- the guy snoring in the next room was actually louder than my husband snoring next to me! The bathroom, even by Italian standards, was just ridiculously small -- it reminded me of a boat "head," and the shower water pooled out of the bathroom and into the bedroom area. I'm sure if we had upgraded there were larger rooms, but I wouldn't want to assume that a higher rate would guarantee a quieter room.

On our first visit, we stayed in an apartment in San Polo and found the area to be local in flavor, yet still close to the main sites.

Our most recent trip was spent staying in an apartment in Cannaregio and we loved that area, too. Very local in flavor and it was still an easy vaporetto ride to anything in the San Maroc, San Polo or Dorsoduro areas.

Venice is so compact and easy to get around with the vaporetto that you really can't go wrong with any area of Venice proper, IMO. I personally would prefer not to stay on one of the outer islands or in Metre, however.