What’s the Damage? Final Venice Budget

A short trip to Venice is potentially one of the most costly city breaks you can take. Even with a Venice Budget, why is this city so expensive? Well, we noticed a few things that might explain this. Apart from the artists and artisans, not much is created or grown in Venice: Goods and materials have to be transported into outlying hubs, and then distributed throughout the city from there.

In the narrow streets, you’ll constantly see young guys delivering palettes of large boxes on wheeled carriers. These overheads contribute in part to the high taxes levied by the local government.

TNT Deliveries

Read Full Article

The Venice of "Don't Look Now"

If like us you’re a bit of a movie fan, then this section is for you. “Don’t Look Now” is a 1973 British-Italian thriller directed by Nicolas Roeg, adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier. It was filmed at a variety of locations throughout Venice, showing a seedier, grittier side of the city.

Keen to get away from the glitz of the “must see” sites of Venice, we organized our routes around the city to include locations from the movie. This had the added bonus of taking us off-track to areas that we probably would not otherwise have visited.

Ponte di Scalzi

Our first location from “Don’t Look Now” was the Ristorante Roma, right next to the Ponte degli Scalzi (vaporetto stop Ferrovia).

Ristorante Roma

This restaurant is where Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland first meet the two psychic sisters early on in the film.

Read Full Article

Venice Osteria and Trattoria

Where to Eat (and where not to eat)

Unless you like to snack throughout the day, you can pretty much calculate that during a 2-day city trip you will need 4 meals: 2 lunches and 2 dinners. This is assuming that you have breakfast included with your hotel. Whether Osteria, Trattoria or Pizzeria, there are plenty of places to choose from.

Considering that Italy is pretty much one big restaurant, there’s never any difficulty finding somewhere to eat. In our experience, the overall quality is generally good to very good. Of all countries in the world, for us a trip to Italy is all about eating, and eating well (we’ll deal with the calories afterwards). In Venice, however, we found we needed to be on our guard to avoid paying way over the odds when choosing a place to indulge.

Before going to Venice, we spent some time online checking out restaurants and cafes that suited our taste and budget. For lunch for 2, with wine included, we were prepared to pay somewhere in the €30-40 range. For dinner, our budget was in the €70-100 range. These prices are marginally more than we would pay at home (which incidentally is also a holiday destination). However, this is Venice, after all – and possibly the most over-priced city in Italy.

Read Full Article

Vaporetti Essentials: Get a Day Pass

Of course, one of the reasons we all go to Venice is to travel on their unique vaporetti transport system. Unless you are particularly flush with cash, you’ll want to do this in the easiest and most economical way possible. The bad news is that there is no particularly cheap way of doing this.

The vaporetti (water buses) provide a regular transport service through the main canals around the city. However, a single ride will cost €7 whether you take the boat for one stop or for a whole Grand Canal tour. This is considerably cheaper than a ride on a Gondola (count on around €100), but several vaporetti trips for 2 people will soon add up.



Read Full Article

Booking a Venice Hotel

Finding a good, reasonably-priced Venice hotel that’s not too far from the centre can be a challenge in itself. TripAdvisor and Agoda are always good ways of researching the best deals that are currently on offer.

We shortlisted a dozen hotels that were rated 80% plus by travellers. We then started to whittle down our choices based on location, price, number & recency of reviews, whether or not breakfast was included, and the quality of the breakfast.

Traffic Jam in Venice

Read Full Article