Venice Travel Blog

Welcome to the Venice Travel Blog

Venice Travel Blog is an extension of our travel-planning Web site, Venice for Visitors, which PC Magazine has called "the premier visitors' site for Venice, Italy." We hope you'll visit often, and we invite you to post your comments about traveling or living in Venice. If you're fond of animals, take a look at our dog blog, Maggie in Venice: A Bearded Collie's Adventures in Italy.

Finally, if you're traveling to Venice for the first time, don't miss our "Introducing Venice" article at Veniceforvisitors.com.

- Durant and Cheryl Imboden

A new hotel on Murano: LaGare Hotel Venezia

ABOVE: The LaGare Hotel Venezia (right) is directly across from the Murano Museo boat platform, which offers direct waterbus connections to Marco Polo Airport, Venice's historic center, and the Marittima cruise terminals.

Murano  is famous for its glass factories and shops, but the car-free island (which lies just off Venice in the Venetian Lagoon) has other attractions, too--including historic churches, a superb Glass Museum, and plenty of restaurants with canalside tables. Until recently, Murano had only a handful of tiny hotels, but now there's a brand-new hostelry in town: the four-star LaGare Hotel Venezia, which belongs to the Accor hotel group's design-oriented M Gallery collection.

The LaGare Hotel Venezia isn't just convenient as a hotel for Murano enthusiasts: It may also be the perfect hotel for cruisers who want to spend a day or two in Venice before departing from the Marritima cruise basin. The118-room boutique hotel is directly adjacent to the Murano Museo waterbus stop, which is served by Alilaguna Blue Line and Red Line boats from Venice Marco Polo Aiport. Blue Line boats also serve the Marittima cruise terminal, which means that you can:

1) Go directly from the airport to the hotel by Alilaguna boat. (The hotel is literally only a few steps from the Alilaguna stop, with no stairs to climb or bridges to cross.)

2) Use the Museo waterbus stop for day trips into Venice's histroric center (about a 20-minute ride on public vaporetti or motoscafi).

3) Catch another Alilaguna Blue Line boat to Marittima on the day of your cruise ship's departure.

Alternatively, you could stay at the LaGare Hotel Venezia after your cruise, taking the Alilaguna boat to Venice Marco Polo Airport when you're ready to fly home.

We definitely recommend considering theLaGare Hotel Venezia if you're cruising with heavy luggage, because you'll eliminate the need for hauling your bulky bags over bridges or hiring an expensive (and sometimes difficult to board) water taxi.

For more information about the hotel, see Booking.com's LaGare Hotel Venezia pages, Venere's LaGare Hotel listing, or the hotel's own site. (You'll probably get the best rate from our discount hotel partners, Booking.com and Venere, but--as always--we recommend comparing rates to be on the safe side.)

To learn more about the island of Murano, read our illustrated 11-page Murano travel guide.

The paving stones of Venice

ABOVE: A rainy day in Venice, Italy.

If you've every found yourself slipping and sliding on wet cobblestones, you'll appreciate one of Venice's least-heralded but most pedestrian-friendly urban features: the use of flat, lightly-textured paving stones that offer good traction underfoot on rainy days.

The same stone is used on many of Venice's 400+ bridges. As a bonus, the city marks the edges of stone steps and canalside pavements with highly-visible strips of white Istrian stone, making it less likely that you'll miss a step or stride inadvertently into a canal.

We don't know who came up with Venice's paving scheme, but urban designers and public-works managers from all over the world could learn a useful lesson by visiting Venice on a rainy day.

Venice from the air: Heliair helicopter tours

 

ABOVE: This nine-minute video offers a great overview of the Venetian Lagoon, the Lido di Venezia, and the islands that surround Venice's historic center.

If you've seen our satellite-image orientation map at Veniceforvisitors.com, you know that Venice is a cluster of islands in the Venetian Lagoon, which is separated from the Adriatic Sea by the Lido di Venezia (a long, narrow resort island). And if you've flown into Venice's Marco Polo Airport, you may have enjoyed a real-time overview of Venice and its Lagoon from the air.

For an even better birds'-eye view of Venice, you can book a private helicopter tour with Heliair, which offers trips of six minutes to half an hour from Nicelli Airport on the Lido di Venezia.

Rates aren't cheap--you'll pay anywhere from 75 to 330 euros per person, depending on the length of the tour--but if you've got the cash, Heliair can provide you with a breathtaking experience.

For details, visit the bilingual Heliair Web site.

BELOW: In a hurry? This YouTube video clip (taken by a passenger) is just over 3-1/2 minutes long and covers the high points of a tour.