Things to Do in Venice

St Mark’s Basilica. The one thing in Venice that is worth arranging your day around. The interior is surfaced almost entirely in gold-ground mosaic, built up across centuries rather than decorated in one campaign, and it does not photograph in a way that prepares you for it.

It runs on timed online entry through the basilica’s own ticket shop, and the ticket is tiered: a basic admission covers the church, and separate or combined tickets add the Pala d’Oro, the museum and the Loggia dei Cavalli — the balcony with the four bronze horses, which is also the best place to stand above the square. The bell tower is ticketed separately again.

One scheduling detail is worth more than any other. On Sunday mornings until 2pm, and during services at any time, the only part open to visitors is the museum and the Horses Loggia — not the church itself. If Sunday is your only full day, plan the basilica for the afternoon.

Go independently; there is no logistical problem for a guide to solve. What a guide does add here is interpretation, and this is a building where that changes the visit — very little of what you are looking at explains itself.

The Doge’s Palace. The seat of the Venetian republic, and the more legible of the two — a building about how a state actually worked, which gives the rooms a logic the basilica does not need.

Its ticket is worth understanding before you buy. The standard admission is a St Mark’s Square museums ticket: one purchase covering the palace plus the Museo Correr, the National Archaeological Museum and the monumental rooms of the Marciana Library, all on the square. Whether you use the other three is up to you, but you are paying for them either way, and the Correr is a quiet place to sit down in a part of the city that offers few.

The palace also runs restricted-route tours through parts of the building the standard itinerary does not reach. Those are by reservation only and for limited numbers, so they are the one thing here that can genuinely be unavailable if you leave it late.

A view over the rooftops. Venice is flat and dense, and it only resolves into a shape from above. There are two towers that do this, and at the moment only one of them is open.

On paper the better of the two is the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, across the water on its own island. Its view back across the basin is the composition that contains St Mark’s, the palace and the campanile itself — which is the one thing the campanile cannot show you, because you are standing in it.

Access to the San Giorgio tower is currently suspended for extraordinary maintenance, with no reopening date announced. Check the abbey’s own site before you plan around it, because this is a closure rather than a permanent loss.

Until it reopens, the campanile in St Mark’s Square is the practical answer. It runs on timed tickets and the ascent is by lift, so it is a short visit to slot into a morning rather than a climb to build a day around.

Ride the Grand Canal once. Venice was built to be arrived at by water, and its main street is still water. The palazzi along the Grand Canal have their real fronts on the canal side — the doors, the steps, the decorated facades all face the boat rather than the alley behind. From land you mostly see their backs.

You do not need a tour for this and you should not buy one. A public vaporetto running the length of the canal does the whole thing for the price of an ordinary ticket, and it is the cheapest hour in Venice that changes how the city reads. Stand outside at the back if there is room; the seats are inside and the windows are not the point.

Which line, which ticket and whether a pass is worth it belong with the rest of the transport question, in Getting Around Venice.

Scuola Grande di San Rocco. The best value-for-effort interior in the city, and the one most first visits miss.

Tintoretto began decorating it in 1564 and kept going for roughly two decades, filling the building with a single enormous cycle of paintings that are still in the rooms they were made for. That last part is what makes it worth the detour: almost nothing else of this scale survives in its original setting rather than redistributed into a museum.

Practically, it is the opposite of the basilica. Tickets are sold on site, there are no timed slots to reserve, and entry is usually quick. It is the thing to do on the afternoon a booking falls through.

Cannaregio and Dorsoduro. The two sestieri that give you the city as a place people live rather than a site you are visiting, and the most useful unstructured hours you can spend here.

Cannaregio runs north from the station along a set of long straight canals and holds the Ghetto, the first quarter in Europe to carry that name. Dorsoduro, across the Grand Canal on the south side, is the university and gallery side of the city and stays open later in the evening than most of Venice does.

Neither needs a plan. Both reward getting lost on purpose, which in Venice is safe in a way it rarely is elsewhere — the historic center is an island, so you cannot walk out of it by accident.

Cicchetti and the bacari. The local eating format, and the most reliable way to eat well here without booking anything.

A bacaro is a small wine bar; cicchetti are the single plates and topped bread eaten standing at the counter with a small glass. You order a few, you move on, and the whole thing costs a fraction of a sit-down meal in the same street.

It is also the honest answer to the complaint that Venice is a tourist trap for food. The trap is real and it is concentrated in exactly the places you would expect — the square, the immediate approaches to the Rialto, anywhere with a photographic menu outside. The bacari are where the city eats around it.

Murano. Roughly ten to fifteen minutes on the lagoon vaporetto from Fondamente Nove, which makes it the one island that genuinely fits into a half day alongside something else.

Glass has been made here since the furnaces were moved off the main islands, and the working demonstrations are the reason to come. Treat the sales floor that follows a demonstration as optional, because it is.

Burano and Torcello. Burano is the one with the painted houses, and it is about forty-five minutes out on the same line, with boats through the day rather than on demand.

Ninety minutes of boat before you count any time on the island is what turns this from an add-on into a commitment. It is worth it — Burano does not look like anywhere else, and the color is a real thing rather than a photographic effect — but plan it as most of a day and not as an afternoon.

Torcello sits just across the water from Burano and is the oldest settled part of the lagoon, now almost empty. It pairs naturally with Burano, but not every boat on the lagoon line calls there and some connections run on request or on a separate short hop, so check the current timetable rather than assuming you can step off wherever you like. If you are already making the journey it is worth the detour; if you are not, it is not a reason to go.