Venice's Hidden Canals: Getting Lost in the City Without Roads

Venice was built on 118 small islands in a shallow lagoon at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea, connected by 400 bridges over 150 canals. The city has no roads — only footpaths, canals, and the bridges that connect them — and the absence of motor traffic gives it a quality of silence that is unlike any other city in the world. The sound of Venice is footsteps on stone, the slap of water against the foundations of palaces, the cry of gondoliers navigating the narrower canals, and the bells of the 139 churches that punctuate the skyline.

The Grand Canal, the main artery of the city, sweeps in a reverse S-curve from the railway station to the Piazza San Marco, lined on both sides by palaces built between the 13th and 18th centuries by the merchant families who made Venice the wealthiest city in the medieval world. The Ca' d'Oro, the Ca' Rezzonico, the Palazzo Grassi, and the Palazzo Barbarigo are among the finest, their Gothic and Renaissance facades reflected in the green water below. The vaporetto water bus runs the length of the canal and offers the best overview of the architecture.

The Basilica di San Marco, at the eastern end of the Piazza San Marco, is one of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture in the world — a building that accumulated its extraordinary decoration over nine centuries as Venice's merchants brought back treasures from their trading voyages across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The four bronze horses above the main entrance are Roman originals, looted from Constantinople in 1204; the mosaics that cover every surface of the interior represent 8,000 square metres of gold-ground work spanning five centuries.

The sestieri — the six districts of Venice — each have a distinct character. Dorsoduro, on the southern side of the Grand Canal, is home to the Gallerie dell'Accademia, which contains the finest collection of Venetian painting in the world, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, housed in the unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal. Cannaregio, in the north, contains the Jewish Ghetto — the original ghetto, from which the word derives — established in 1516 and home to five synagogues still in use today.

The islands of the Venetian lagoon offer an escape from the crowds of the main city. Murano, a ten-minute vaporetto ride from Venice, has been the centre of Venetian glassmaking since 1291, when the furnaces were moved from the city to reduce the risk of fire. The glass factories offer tours and demonstrations, and the Museo del Vetro documents the history of the craft from Roman times to the present. Burano, further into the lagoon, is famous for its brightly painted houses and its lace-making tradition, and the coloured reflections in the canals make it one of the most photogenic places in Italy.

Venice is sinking — or rather, the combination of natural subsidence and rising sea levels is causing the acqua alta, the high water that periodically floods the Piazza San Marco and the lower floors of the city's buildings, to become more frequent and more severe. The MOSE project, a system of mobile flood barriers at the three inlets of the lagoon, was completed in 2020 after decades of delays and corruption scandals, and has been deployed successfully during several high-water events. Whether it will be sufficient to protect the city in the long term remains an open question.

The best time to visit Venice is in the shoulder seasons — April-May and September-October — when the summer crowds have thinned and the light is at its most beautiful. The Carnival, held in February, is one of Europe's great festivals, with elaborate masked costumes filling the campi and the bridges for ten days before Lent. Staying in the city rather than commuting from the mainland makes an enormous difference to the experience: Venice after the day-trippers have left, in the early morning and late evening, is a different city — quieter, more mysterious, and more beautiful.