VENICE

VENICE, ITALY

City guide

Venice is a year-round open scenery for 16.5 million tourists, which visit this city every year. It's a hybrid of land and water, built on wooden beams and raised from mudflats of the lagoon. The only artificial city ever created, floating already since 8th century BC.

Venice is charming and elegant, but pretentious and dirty at the same time. It has everything I normally hate about cities - a lot of tourist (16.5 millions tourists compared to 60,000 inhabitants), terribly crowded streets, over-priced restaurants, sea of souvenir shops - everywhere, no parks, no benches to sit. Also, I had my worse pizza ever here. My mum hated it, it’s smell and worn-down buildings, the amount of people. Still, somehow, I keep coming back. Not because of Piazza San Marco, Rialto bridge or gondolas. Because of Biennale di Venezia, be it architecture or art. I keep coming back for six years now, to spend three days at least. One day to walk between the pavilions in Giardini Gardens, second day to walk through exhibitions in Arsenale and third day to wander through the city and discover the rest of the pavilions, hidden in narrow streets. And even though I don’t like Venice as a city very much, I love Venice as a scenery for the Biennale. Because it's undeniably beautiful in it's own bizzarre way. 

RECOMMENDATIONS

 

1. Visit some of the near islands - Burano (small fisherman’s island with colourful houses), Murano famous for it's glass or Torcello. 

2. Walk through Rialto and visit fish Market San Lorenzo

3. Walk to the other side of the city across wodden bridge La Accademia 

4. visit Peggy Guggenheim Collection of modern art

5. Sleep on the boat (we booked ours at Bruno’s) - cheap and comfortable way of spending your night there. Moreover the port is located in a quiet part with a lot of greenery (for Venice standards), no tourists, and it’s very close to Biennale too.

Photos and text: by me

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