Top Things to Do in Venice, Italy, Venice, Italy

Venice delivers on every postcard promise and then some. Here's our complete guide to the best things to do in Venice - from San Marco to Burano, with the timing and insider details that make the difference.

We hit Venice in the mid-morning on Sunday 20 August 2023, stepping off the vaporetto at San Zaccaria and walking the two-hundred metres to the Bridge of Sighs before the morning cruise crowds arrived. The canal below was unusually quiet; a single gondola slid through the white limestone arch of the Ponte dei Sospiri while the Riva degli Schiavoni was still in shadow. We had four days, two parents, two children (aged 10 and 14 at the time), and a campervan parked at a campsite near Castelfranco Veneto, half an hour's train ride inland.

This guide is the distilled version of what we actually walked, ate, and photographed from 19 to 23 August 2023: Venice proper, Burano for half a day, Dorsoduro at golden hour, and the quiet bits of Cannaregio that everyone means when they say the locals still live there. If you're visiting with kids and don't want to queue for ninety minutes to see the Basilica, this is the order we'd do it again in.

A quick calibration. August in Venice is hot, crowded, and extraordinary. We did our major sight-walking between 10:00 and 12:30, retreated for a long lunch indoors, then went back out from about 16:30 until the light died around 20:30. Aperitivo on a Cannaregio canal in the early evening with a glass of wine and a plate of cicchetti (crostini with crab, cheese, small salt fish) is the single memory our kids still ask about a year on. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).