Some people fall helplessly and permanently for Venice at first glance. Others find it disagreeable: over-priced, overcrowded, over-praised by its worshippers. (Books about Venice, like cookbooks, always do well.) Whatever your initial response, you end up enchanted. Venice is the Babylon or Persepolis of our times. You do not feel obliged, as in Rome or Florence, to study monuments and works of art, though the churches and palaces are stuffed with them and remain of course some of the best places to visit. Just to be afloat with that festive pink-and-grey gâteau of a city around you is enough. It is too much for some. The Vorticists wanted to flatten the place and fill up the canals with the rubble of the buildings.

Refugees from the mainland founded Venice in the 5thC AD. Acciden­tally they hit on a fulcrum of Old World economy. The marshy haven became the trading post and mart of western Europe and the Middle East. Greeks, Byzantines, Goths, Tuscans, Lombards, Moors and Franks stamped their architectural trademarks on the city. Venice provided transport for the Crusades, conquered and planted colonies over the eastern Mediterranean, turned back the Sultan and fought the Moors and mediated between Rome and Constantinople. The city was La Serenissima, Queen of the Adriatic, Mistress of the Seas, most powerful of maritime republics – until Columbus discovered America and economic strategy took a new direction. Even so, Venice remained an independent state until the end of the 18thC.

Venice is not an island. It is 117 islands, separated by 45 km of canals and rii (branch canals) which average only 4 m in width and vary from 1 m to 2 m in depth, according to the tide. The Grand Canal is about 4 m deep. One canal goes under a church (Santo Stefano). When you look over Venice from the campanile in St Mark’s Square you see no canals – the buildings hide them – but plenty of sandbanks all over the lagoon. The great palazzi and churches of Venice rest on sandbanks like those, on millions of wooden piles, driven 6 m down into hard blue clay. Floodwater and rising damp have made many ground floors unusable, but the buildings stand firm. Palaces galore, many nowadays museums or hotels, embroider the waterways with their fretted alcoves and the frivolous masonry of interlocking arcs and circles and intricate armorial devices under which smart motor launches tie up in the spaces formerly reserved for gondolas.

You walk the canals on footways and cross them on high-arched bridges, rather tiring to the legs. St Mark’s Square is the only piazza but in front of churches you will often come across a campo (‘field’) like a small piazza.

Reclaimed land on the east and west extremities gives Venice horizontal space – on the west for the big railway terminus and the quays for ocean liners, on the east for the football stadium, the naval dockyard and the gardens of the Biennale art exhibitions.

Accommodation guidelines

Hotel prices in Venice are almost everywhere way over the top. The mere location doubles what you would reasonably expect to pay and it is only a general rule, with many exceptions, that the farther you retreat from the Grand Canal the cheaper it becomes. In July and Carnival Week (before Lent) accommodation is virtually unobtainable for the casual arrival.

Locanda Fiorita, just off Campo Santo Stefano is a great choice for a clean, comfortable and well-price room.  For those looking for a bit more space, Palazzo Ca’Nova offers luxury self-catering apartments just five minutes from Piazza San Marco.

Venice is also a surprisingly noisy city. Budget travellers should consider accommodation at a distance. It is easy to make full day-trips from Treviso, Padua and even Vicenza.

Neighbourhoods to avoid

Venice benefits from its island situation. Violent crime is rare because escape is difficult. Surreptitious pilfer­ing – pickpocketing and the like – goes on here as elsewhere.

Arriving

By car: you have the choice of parking at Mestre, the inland end of the Venice causeway, and taking a five- minute train ride (the cheapest option – 8 euros a day); or crossing the causeway to the car park at Isola del Tronchetto, near the railway station – 21 euros a day; or the car park in Piazzale Roma across the Grand Canal – 20 euros a day.

By train: the railway station for Mestre and the mainland world is Santa Lucia at the west end of the Grand Canal. From there it is only a step to the quays where boats go to all parts of the city.

By air: Marco Polo airport is on the mainland 8 km north east of Mestre. The airport bus brings you to the railway station. Fast motor-boats (motoscafi) plying between the airport and San Marco, east end of the Grand Canal, are expensive: around 90 euros return but this would be for a party of (usually) four people. The Air Terminal is on Riva degli Schiavoni, next door to Piazza San Marco. The vaporetto or water bus costs 8 euros one way.

Venice transport

The motive power in Venice, apart from your own two feet, is aquatic: the vaporetto (‘steamer’ or waterbus), the motoscafo (hired launch) and the gondola. Gondolas are expensive – a 40-minute trip for six people after 7 pm can cost 100 euros.

The only cheap gondola experience is the traghetto or ferry, across the Grand Canal for, typically, 8 euros. On this main artery there are four traghetto stations and seven ordinary gondola pick-up points. Gondola numbers are declining, like the heraldically striped barber’s-pole mooring posts: there were about 400 at the last count, compared with 10,000 in the 18thC.

Motoscafi can be hailed or hired by telephone. They are fast – and cost 40-70 euros for a city centre trip.

Vaporettiare organized in 12 linee, 17 in summer. Linea 1 plies the Grand Canal, stopping at 19 stages and crossing to the Lido. Linea 5 goes round the city in both directions and also visits islands in the lagoon. Linea 28 goes non-stop up and down the Grand Canal. Buy tickets on the landing-stage: various types are offered, for example 7 euros for 60 minutes; one-day travel card 30 euros; seven-day travel card 60 euros. For a downloadable vaporetto route map see www.actv.it.

Walking

You are sure to get lost. Street signposting is in dialect and house numberings are illogical; but you do not go far without seeing the yellow arrow ‘Al vaporetto’. Relax in picturesque angles at intersections of rii without apprehension. Harassment is rare and Venice, self-contained and proud of it, claims to be the safest of major Italian cities.

Using this section

Do the walks, or parts of the walks, or absorb the information in an armchair.