Venice without the crowd: where the city is yours alone
San Marco in half an hour — and on into the city they do not print on postcards.
Most tourists live Venice by a single script: station — Rialto — St Mark's Square — and back to the train. Three hours, a thousand identical photos, no city. And the city itself begins exactly where that route ends.
Below are six places the crowd barely reaches, where you are left with the city alone.
1. Cannaregio at dawn
The most lived-in district of the island. In the morning the washing is hung out here, the coffee is carried round, and the canals stand like mirrors. Walk along the Fondamenta della Misericordia — a long quay of bars where in the evening the Venetians gather, not the tourists. Until nine in the morning the quay is yours alone.
2. Cicchetti instead of a restaurant
Forget the menu with photographs of the dishes. Venetian food in its native form is cicchetti: small tartlets and open sandwiches eaten standing at the bar. Take a glass of wine (ombra), a couple of cicchetti — and move on to the next bar. It is lunch and a route at once.
The rule is simple: if the locals are standing in a bar at 11 in the morning with a glass, this is your place.
3. The Zattere and the view of the Giudecca
The long sunlit quay in the south of Dorsoduro. No souvenirs, no queues — only water, light and perhaps the city's finest gelato. People come here when they are tired of the tight streets and want at last to see the horizon.
4. The Libreria Acqua Alta
A bookshop where the books are kept in gondolas and old bathtubs — in case of high water. Yes, it is known by now, but it is worth ten minutes: the back courtyard with a staircase built of soaked volumes is the strangest photograph you will carry away from Venice.
5. San Giorgio instead of the San Marco campanile
The queue for the San Marco campanile is nearly an hour. To the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water — five minutes and a lift. And the view from there is that famous, postcard one, only turned towards San Marco itself. A paradox few make use of.
6. Getting lost on purpose
The best thing to do in Venice is to put away the phone and turn into the first empty lane. There is no 'wrong' turn here: sooner or later you will come out at the water all the same. To be truly lost on the island is impossible, but to find a quiet square where only the echo of your own steps is heard — that will happen almost at once.
How to fit this into one day
Begin in the morning with Cannaregio, come down to the Rialto for cicchetti, cross the bridge into Dorsoduro and reach the Zattere by sunset. San Giorgio and the Acqua Alta are on the way, at any convenient moment. You will have a day in which the obligatory Venice takes an hour, and the living one all the rest.
Venice is not an open-air museum but a living city. Give it half a day beyond the obligatory programme, and it will stop being a backdrop for photographs and become a place you want to return to.
