At the risk of telling you something you already know, you won’t be the only one here. You’ll be joining 60,000 visitors on a busy day, a number that only keeps climbing despite civic efforts to curb it. If that feels like bad news, if it makes you feel like you’re just following a flock, here’s a little counterbalancing good news: It’s easy to give the crowds the slip. You just have to get lost.

When everyone zigs, you need to zag. Turn right instead of left, head down a street that looks like a dead end but leads over a bridge, go straight through a piazzetta, turn right, and keep going along the calle. See how quiet everything got? How it feels like you’re the only one in the city, even though you’re only five minutes from the throng you left behind? This is just one more reason this improbably gorgeous, weird, and mystical city is so utterly magical: You now feel like you have it all to yourself.

And don’t worry about where you are. Venice is a concentrated collection of connected islands, and unless you jump into the sea (please don’t), you’ll eventually find your way back to safety, to the ubiquitous arrows on the city walls indicating the routes Per Rialto, Per S. Marco, All’Accademia.

I’ve been coming to Venice since I was a toddler, for the first decades on day trips from the family seat in Padua, on longer visits as an adult. A few years ago, my husband and I rented an apartment in residential Castello for the sleepy month of January, and by the third morning, the barista knew our coffee order. And therein lies another of its magic tricks: For all the changes Venice has seen — wrought by pilgrims and invaders, traders and artists, lovers and politicians — this city and its charms remain remarkably constant.

I’ve been stopping for afternoon cicchetti and lingering over late-night snacks at Osteria Bancogiro and Naranzaria in Campo Erberia for decades — and I’ll go back next time, too. When Matteo Flumian, the concierge at Violino d’Oro, recently recommended Osteria di Santa Marina as his favorite restaurant in town, I should have known better than to be surprised. I had an amazing dinner there with my father in 2004, but had been afraid to return since, lest I find it in any way inferior to my memory of the place. When I went for lunch and told co-owner Danilo Baldan how I remembered desserts they had served me two decades earlier in mismatched teacups, he said, “Ah, si, my wife’s china. Sadly, we smashed them all!”

Yes, it’s good to have that list of things you absolutely must do from friends and experts (hey! thanks for reading this guide!), but because Venice is fundamentally a city of mystery — totally other and unknowable — it’s a good idea to just give up and let the streets take you where they might. (And leave your phone in your pocket because Google Maps gets locations and addresses wrong all the time. That Castello apartment I lived in? Google thought it was four piazzas away. Take that, technology.)

Don’t worry about your list. Don’t look for Real Venice. Don’t look for Authentic Venice. Just look for your Venice.
— Pavia Rosati

After the invention of the printing press, Venice was the center of the European publishing world. The literary tradition continues at the three-year-old nonprofit Wetlands, which publishes books about Venice, its lagoon, and their cultural and ecological impact on the world, written in English and Italian by an international roster of authors. At the helm of the passionate team is founder and editorial manager Clara Zanardi, a 36-year-old from nearby Belluno with a background in urban anthropology. She has thoughts about how her beloved adopted city should be responsibly managed.

The publishing industry slowly abandoned Venice as it became easier and less expensive to work outside the historic city. We decided to go against the tide and make high-quality, beautiful books using old artisanal methods, entirely in the city. Our covers are made from recycled algae (a symbol of our connection to the environment), the graphic design is by a Venetian studio, and the books are printed at the last manual typography studio in town.

Wetlands’ books address the problems, resources, history, and culture of Venice in a new way, giving voice to interesting Italian and international writers. Contemporary problems, like rising sea levels and overtourism, are manifested more intensely in Venice, and we see Venice as a paradigm for the direction the world is going, and for how we could create a more sustainable world.

Venice is the global example of a city where tourism is excessive — the city has already exceeded its ability to accommodate tourists. Tourism should be regulated at the source, not when it arrives: By the time the tourism arrives, it’s already too late. Where tourism is less established, you can look at managing through prevention. On a cultural level, this means creating awareness and encouraging people to visit in the offseason. This is a demarketing strategy, but no one does this because most cities, including Venice, instead invest millions of euros in tourism promotion.

The tourist tax experiment last summer cost more than it earned and did absolutely nothing to alleviate overtourism. If anything, Venice saw more tourists. Most Venetians judged this initiative negatively, but the politicians were happy (though who knows why). Setting up a payment system where only those who can afford to pay can enter is wrong. Cities should not be closed. They’re not museums; they are not cages. We’re a democracy. People need to be free to move.
—P.R.

Further’s well-traveled friends and contributors share their favorites

While only a fool would suggest that any of Venice’s six sestieri are entirely off the beaten path, Cannaregio, the northernmost of the neighborhoods and the one nearest the train station, comes closest, which may be why so many Venetians call it home. For all its attractions, it draws fewer tourists, though it’s worth a visit for the art-filled churches (Sant’Alvise, Madonna dell’Orto) and the Jewish Ghetto. Locals flock to Cannaregio, especially on weekends, to discover new wines, stock up on vintage, and jostle for a table along the canal for yet another round of cicchetti. Here is where they go.

Venice owes everything to the Lido. For centuries, this long, low island has protected the lagoon from invaders and Adriatic storms, allowing the city it defends to blossom like a hothouse flower: different, extravagant, unique.

But it wasn’t until the latter part of the 19th century that visitors to Italy began to see the Lido itself as a destination, spurred on by the new craze for sea bathing. The rural island transformed itself into an elegant beach resort peppered with Art Nouveau villas and grand hotels like the Des Bains, inaugurated in 1900. Inspired by a stay here in 1911, German writer Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice made the Lido a watchword for melancholy seaside decadence.

In 1932, decadence evolved into glamour when Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, and a host of other stars arrived here for the first edition of the Venice Film Festival, which still, today, for 10 days in August and September, fills the Lido with paparazzi, Hollywood royalty, and global cineastes. I’ve been covering the festival as a film critic since 1996 — which means I’ve spent very nearly a year-ful of days on an island which, when I first began to come here, felt like “true” Venice’s boring suburban cousin. Instead of canals and gondolas, there are actual roads on the Lido, with cars and buses. Where Venice proper has medieval palazzi rooted in water, its seaward relative offers a grid-plan patchwork of mostly 20th-century architecture. Some of it, admittedly, is rather glorious — like the recently restored Ausonia Hungaria hotel, its facade entirely covered in decorative Art Nouveau majolica tiles.

What was it that turned me into a Lido lover? Was it a change of heart re boring suburbanism? Possibly. But I prefer to think that, in an era when I have seen historic Venice struggle to maintain the community spirit that makes the city more than just a museum (its population has dipped to below 50,000 residents, down from around 175,000 in 1951), the Lido still has that fellow feeling in abundance. And in recent years, it has even started to get its style mojo back.

It’s not just Venetians that are heading to the Lido’s beach clubs these days. Global travelers have cottoned on to the fact that it’s just a 10-minute vaporetto ride between an intense morning at the Biennale and a relaxing afternoon of sun, sand, and spritz. Over the years, I have danced barefoot by the water at hippie-chic Pachuka and gone full tuxedo at one of the film festival parties hosted by the swanky Des Bains 1900. (The hotel where Mann once stayed has been closed for years, but its beachward annex was relaunched in 2022 and has become the cool Lido summer hangout.)

Reopened in 2007 after a nine-year revamp, the island’s private Nicelli Airport is an Art Deco delight that dates back to 1926. It’s become a regular venue for Art and Architecture Biennale events — most recently a design exhibit by Milan’s Nilufar Gallery. From August to October 2024 the airport restaurant, with its wide terrace overlooking the grass airstrip, hosted a hot-ticket pop-up by official film festival chef Tino Vettorello (rumor has it he’ll be back).

But the Lido also makes for a good early-evening hop from Venice for an aperitivo at one of the many alfresco bars on the Lungomare seafront promenade (my favorite, El Pecador, colonizes a London double-decker bus), followed by dinner at Osteria Al Mercà, a friendly trattoria with fresh-off-the-boat seafood located in the island’s former fish market. Venice’s centro storico islands never fail to enchant, but after a day of too much tourism, Titian, and Tintoretto, the Lido — which strikes me as more authentically Venetian than Venice itself these days — is the perfect decompression chamber.
— Lee Marshall

Pavia Rosati is the founder of the award-winning travel website Fathom and the newsletter Way to Go. She splits her time between New York, London, and Italy.

Lee Marshall is a travel and film writer based in rural Umbria, Italy. Originally from England, he contributes to Condé Nast Traveler, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail, Travel + Leisure, and others.

Skye McAlpine is a cookbook author and founder of Tavola, a housewares brand inspired by Venetian craft with a dash of British chintz. Born in London, she moved to Venice with her parents at the age of six and has never really left, now dividing her time between the two cities.

Ben Schott is a miscellanist, almanacist, journalist, novelist, and homager with sidelines in design, branding, and photography.