There’s only one city in the world that consists of 118 islands, 160 canals and 447 bridges, and that’s Venice. Late winter is a perfect time to visit, after the Carnival crowds have parted and before the Easter break signals the arrival of the warmer, touristier months. Of course, Venice is blissfully calm compared to most places any time of year, due to the fact that the streets are made of water and cars generally avoid them.
Venice is about boats: the vaporettos (or water taxis) shuttle up and down the Grand Canal and across the wider canal that separates the island of the Giudecca-home of the legendary Hotel Cipriani-from Dorsoduro. Gondolas bob with elegant insouciance in St. Mark’s Basin. You can take a gondola ride if you want, but they’re expensive. Between the vaporetto and your own two feet, you can get pretty much anywhere you need to go.
In the off-season, sights that can be overrun in summer become eminently more accessible. Start at Piazza San Marco with the 14th-century Palazzo Ducale, or Doge’s Palace, which housed the Venice’s senate, hall of justice and private apartments of the Doge until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. General admission lets you peruse the Doge’s apartments, ornate assembly halls of the former ruling nobility and prisons on the other side of the diminutive Bridge of Sighs. But for a few euros more you can join a guided “Secret Itineraries” tour that takes you into a warren of rooms under the palace roof. It includes the secret state archives (an impressive room designed like a ship captain’s quarters) and the jail cell where that old playboy Casanova was incarcerated before he escaped (but to see the garden where Casanova wooed the ladies, you have to head back to Guidecca and get past the Hotel Cipriani gates).
Don’t miss having a cappuccino in the Doge’s Palace ground floor café, an exceptional setting with vaulted brick ceilings and a glassed-in portal that opens onto the Rio Canonica canal. Across the Grand Canal in the sestiere of Dorsoduro you’ll find the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which, name recognition notwithstanding, has nothing on the extraordinary Ca’ Rezzonico, which houses the Museum of the Eighteenth Century in Venice. The visit begins in the refurbished second-floor ballroom and continues through a succession of rooms and five floors lavishly decorated with original Venetian furniture. There are frescoes by Tiepolo and paintings by Canaletto and Pietro Longhi at every turn. If contemporary art is more your thing, don’t miss whatever exhibit is on hand at the Palazzo Grassi.
In the northernmost Venetian sestiere, Cannaregio, you’ll find the world’s original ghetto (a Venetian word), which is worth a visit whether you’re Jewish or not. Established in 1516, the ghetto lasted until 1797. Of the handful of remaining synagogues, three can be seen on the excellent guided tours offered by the Jewish Museum in Venice. Two are Ashkenazi and one Sephardic; all are richly adorned, in keeping with the Jews’ vital, if rigidly compartmentalized, place in Venetian society.
As for churches, whew! There are more than 400 of them, and they offer an unparalleled repository of art. But by no means miss the Scuole Grandi, flamboyant buildings that used to be the homes of charity and social service centers. The ceiling of the Scuole Grande de San Rocco is covered with so many Tintoretto canvases that they’ve put up mirrors to help you take in all the details.
Attractions in Venice are myriad but the atmosphere is the most intense thing of all. Under cool gray skies, or bright ones softly warming up, you can meander the sides of canals and hidden campos, or squares, with ease and duck into whatever church or little shop tickles your fancy. You might find yourself in front of La Fenice, the venerable Venetian opera house, or at a café on the Zattere, the famous promenade of Dorsoduro that has for a front yard the Guidecca canal, nursing that signature Venetian drink, the spritz: white wine from the Veneto, Aperol (like Campari, but lighter) and soda with ice. The orange glint of the cocktail mirrors the milky emerald gleam of the canals. You might find yourself having a second, then another…even more so than Paris, this remarkable city invites lingering, and reflection. You float on the streets here, it’s a city of dreams.
Anthony Grant is the author of “Access Paris” (HarperCollinsPublishers)