Venice in 2 days, on foot

This 2-day self-guided walking plan for Venice covers 42 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 2 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; Venice rewards a detour.

Day 1

Morning

1. St Mark's Basilica: The crown jewel of Venice, a Byzantine masterpiece begun in 828 AD to house the relics of St Mark, lavished with golden mosaics covering 8,000 square metres of vaulted ceiling.
2. Doge's Palace: The magnificent Gothic seat of Venetian power for over a thousand years, housing the world's largest oil painting and connected to the infamous Bridge of Sighs.
3. Bridge of Sighs: The iconic enclosed limestone bridge of 1614 connecting the Doge's Palace to the New Prison, made famous by Byron's poem describing condemned prisoners' last glimpse of Venice.
4. Piazza San Marco: Napoleon called it the 'drawing room of Europe', Venice's only square bears the title Piazza, surrounded by the Procuratie arcades, one of the oldest cafés in the world, and the façade of St Mark's Basilica.
5. Campanile di San Marco: Venice's tallest structure at 99 metres, the bell tower collapsed dramatically in 1902 and was rebuilt brick by brick, reopening in 1912 with a lift to the panoramic summit.
6. Grand Canal: Venice's magnificent main waterway stretches 3.8 km in a reverse S-curve through the heart of the city, lined by over 200 palaces from the 13th to 18th centuries.
7. Rialto Bridge: The oldest bridge across the Grand Canal, completed in 1591 on 226 wooden piles, its single stone arch lined with portico shops selling gold, jewellery, and souvenirs.
8. Rialto Market: Venice's legendary open-air market operating since 1097, offering the freshest Adriatic seafood, lagoon fish, and seasonal produce in a setting of medieval loggia and canal-side activity.
9. Gallerie dell'Accademia: Venice's supreme art museum, housing the world's finest collection of Venetian painting from the 14th to 18th centuries, including masterpieces by Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.
10. Peggy Guggenheim Collection: American heiress Peggy Guggenheim's Grand Canal palazzo houses one of Europe's finest modern art collections, with Dalí, Picasso, Pollock, Kandinsky, and Giacometti's sculptures on the waterfront terrace.
11. Basilica dei Frari: Venice's grandest Gothic church, home to Titian's breathtaking Assumption of the Virgin (1518), Bellini's glowing altarpiece, and the tombs of Titian and the composer Monteverdi.

Afternoon

1. Scuola Grande di San Rocco: A treasure house of 60 monumental Tintoretto canvases covering every wall and ceiling, painted over 23 years, described by Ruskin as one of the three finest buildings in Italy.
2. Ca' d'Oro: The 'House of Gold', the finest Gothic palace on the Grand Canal, built in the 1420s-1430s with a gilded facade, now housing the Franchetti Gallery of sculpture and painting.
3. Murano Island: The island of glass-making since 1291, a 30-minute vaporetto ride from Venice, where master glassblowers create extraordinary objects using centuries-old millefiori and filigree techniques.
4. Burano Island: A 45-minute ferry ride from Venice, Burano enchants with its brightly painted fishermen's houses in every colour of the rainbow and its centuries-old tradition of fine needle lacemaking.
5. Torcello Island: The oldest settled island in the Venetian lagoon, now almost deserted, with the magnificent 7th-century Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta housing stunning Byzantine mosaics and the mysterious Throne of Attila.
6. Cannaregio District: Venice's most authentic neighbourhood, home to the world's first Jewish Ghetto (1516), the grand Strada Nova shopping street, and canals largely free of tourist crowds.
7. Jewish Ghetto: The world's first compulsory Jewish quarter, established in Venice in 1516 on the island of Geto Nuovo, giving its name to every ghetto since, a community that endured four centuries of persecution and produced extraordinary cultural life.
8. Dorsoduro: Venice's art and student district, home to the Accademia, Guggenheim Collection, and the Zattere promenade, with the best aperitivo scene and a liveliness that survives even in winter.
9. Punta della Dogana: The former 17th-century customs house at the tip of Dorsoduro, spectacularly renovated by architect Tadao Ando in 2009, now housing François Pinault's world-class contemporary art collection.
10. Fondaco dei Tedeschi Rooftop: The medieval warehouse of German merchants on the Grand Canal, renovated by OMA architects, now a luxury department store offering free rooftop access with the best panoramic views over Venice.

Day 2

Morning

1. Acqua Alta & MOSE Barrier: Venice sinks 2mm per year as sea levels rise, the seasonal acqua alta flooding has shaped city life for centuries, while the completed MOSE barrier system now protects the lagoon from the Adriatic.
2. Libreria Acqua Alta: The world's most extraordinary bookshop, where books are stored in gondolas and bathtubs to survive Venice's floods, home to resident cats and a staircase built from book spines.
3. Arsenale di Venezia: The largest shipyard in medieval Europe and the foundation of Venetian naval power, capable of producing a complete warship per day, now the spectacular venue for the Venice Biennale.
4. Venice Biennale: The world's oldest and most prestigious contemporary art festival, held since 1895 in the Giardini pavilions and the Arsenale, transforming Venice into the global capital of contemporary art every two years.
5. San Giorgio Maggiore: Palladio's masterpiece church of 1566 on its own island across from Piazza San Marco, with a bell tower offering possibly the finest views of Venice, and Tintoretto's Last Supper inside.
6. Teatro La Fenice: 'The Phoenix' opera house has burned twice and been rebuilt each time, it premiered Verdi's La Traviata in 1853 and remains one of the most beautiful and historically significant opera houses in the world.
7. Gondola Tradition: The iconic flat-bottomed black gondola has carried Venetians for a thousand years, 400 licensed gondoliers still practise this ancient craft, each boat handmade with an asymmetric hull that compensates for the gondolier's single oar.
8. Caffè Florian: Caffè Florian, opened in 1720, is one of the oldest continuously operating cafés in the world and the oldest in Italy, its frescoed and mirrored rooms welcoming everyone from Casanova to Goethe to Byron while an orchestra plays beneath the arcades of Piazza San Marco.
9. Santa Maria della Salute: The great Baroque church that commands the entrance of the Grand Canal was built as an ex-voto offering to the Virgin Mary following the devastating plague of 1630–31, which killed one-third of Venice's population, and rests on 1.2 million wooden piles.
10. Vaporetto Route 1: Vaporetto Line 1 is the slow water bus that makes 22 stops along the full length of the Grand Canal, offering the most spectacular and most affordable sightseeing journey in Venice past 200 historic palaces.
11. Venetian Carnival: The world's most famous carnival, held each February in the ten days before Lent, fills Piazza San Marco with masks, costumes, and masked balls, reviving a tradition that goes back at least to the 12th century when Venice's rulers used masks to erase class distinctions.

Afternoon

1. Squero di San Trovaso: The Squero di San Trovaso is one of only two remaining traditional gondola boatyards in Venice, recognisable by its Alpine chalet-style wooden buildings, where craftsmen still build and repair gondolas using the same techniques practised for centuries.
2. Museo Correr: The Museo Correr, on the upper floors of the Procuratie Nuove on Piazza San Marco, is the civic museum of Venice, housing the city's remarkable collection of maps, costumes, processional objects, weapons, and paintings that trace Venetian history from the earliest Republic.
3. Ca' Rezzonico: Ca' Rezzonico is a magnificent Baroque palace on the Grand Canal now housing the Museo del Settecento Veneziano, the Museum of 18th-Century Venice, with Tiepolo frescoed ceilings, period furniture, and paintings that bring the glittering last century of the Venetian Republic to life.
4. Lido di Venezia: The Lido is the long barrier island that separates the Venice Lagoon from the Adriatic Sea, a beach resort with Art Deco hotels, the famous Hotel Excelsior, and the home of the Venice Film Festival, held each September since 1932 at the Palazzo del Cinema.
5. Murano Glassblowing Demonstrations: Murano's glassblowing furnaces offer live demonstrations where master glassblowers shape molten glass at 1,400°C with breath and iron rods, the most historic workshop is Barovier & Toso, founded in 1295, making it the oldest continuously operating glass company in the world.
6. Scuola Grande di San Marco: The Scuola Grande di San Marco is one of the finest Renaissance buildings in Venice, its facade featuring extraordinary trompe-l'oeil marble columns and lions in perspective, today it serves as the entrance hall of Venice's main civic hospital.
7. Ponte dell'Accademia: The Ponte dell'Accademia is a wooden bridge spanning the Grand Canal at its narrowest southern crossing, offering one of the most famous views in Venice, looking back east toward the white dome of Santa Maria della Salute framed between the canal's palaces.
8. Palazzetto Bru Zane: The Palazzetto Bru Zane is a charming early 18th-century casino in the San Polo sestiere, now the Centre for French Romantic Music, hosting intimate chamber concerts and performing a unique role in rediscovering forgotten 19th-century French opera and orchestral works.
9. Jacopo Tintoretto's Venice: Jacopo Tintoretto, born in the Cannaregio neighbourhood in 1518 and buried at the Madonna dell'Orto, lived his entire life in Venice and left more of his work in the city than any other Renaissance master, his home on the Fondamenta dei Mori is still marked by a memorial plaque.
10. Venetian Food: Cicchetti: Cicchetti are the Venetian version of tapas, small bites of bread topped with salt cod mousse, marinated sardines, polenta with gorgonzola, or fried seafood, served from the counters of bacari (wine bars) across the city, washed down with a small glass of wine called an ombra.

Full Venice guide and all stops → · Other itineraries: 3 days