Venice Travel Blog

'Aerial Venice' at Venice for Visitors

We're about to launch a new subsidiary site of Venice for Visitors. It's called "Aerial Venice," and it's designed to let you explore Venice from above before your visit.

The site makes use of Google satellite-photo maps. Each image measures at least 750 x 500 pixels (which is fairly large, as such maps go), and the typical page has two pictures:

1. A satellite-photo map that looks straight down and gives an overview of the featured location and its surroundings.

2. A close-up or "bird's eye" view, usually at a 45-degree angle, that matches what you might see in the final minute or two of a parachute descent.

To provide a more enjoyable experience, we've avoided the use of the teardrop-shaped markers and dialogue balloons that clutter and hide details so many Google-based photo maps. Instead, we've preceded each set of images with a description of what you'll see. (We've also included links to related Aerial Venice pages and Venice for Visitors articles in our descriptions.)

Aerial Venice topics range from major squares and sights to transportation hubs such as the Santa Lucia Railroad Station, the Piazzale Roma, Venice Marco Polo and Treviso Airports, and the Venice cruise port.

If you'd like to see the pages that are online when you read this, click the link below or type the name into your browser:

aerialvenice.com

Photo in banner: Matthew Dixon.

"Introducing Venice" at Venice for Visitors

ABOVE: Santa Lucia Railroad Station is on the edge of Venice's centro storico or historic center.

We've just published an article at Venice for Visitors that we should have written long ago: It gives an orientation and overview of Venice in three easy-to-read pages.

The article is titled "Introducing Venice," and it covers several important topics:

• Basic geography, with a satellite-photo map that shows the Venetian Lagoon, the city's historic center, the airport, the railroad station, the cruise terminals, and other major landmarks.

• Picking the right hotel location, with a zoomed-in photo map to help you understand which areas of town are likely to be the most convenient (or inconvenient) for your purposes.

• Arriving and getting around, with links to our articles on arriving in Venice, using public transportation, navigating Venice on foot, and related topics.

If you're visiting Venice for the first time, this quick tutorial will help you avoid confusion, and it could save you from making costly and frustrating planning mistakes. To read it, go to:

• Introducing Venice at Veniceforvisitors.com

VENICE FOR ROOKIES e-book guide

ABOVE: The cover of Venice for Rookies, which is available in formats for computers, smartphones, and e-readers such as Kindle, Kobo, and Nook.

Although we publish the Web's leading travel-planning site about Venice, Venice for Visitors, we're also big fans of guidebooks--if only because outrageous data-roaming charges often make it impractical to browse the Web on a phone or other mobile device while you're walking around a foreign city.

Of course, guidebooks have weaknesses of their own: They're often out of date (many guidebooks are updated at two- or three-year intervals), and they can be a nuisance to carry around, especially if you're on a multi-city trip. That's why e-books can be appealing:

• An e-book lets you store the contents of a guidebook on your laptop, mobile phone, or tablet, and...

• If the e-book is both written and published by the author, there's a good chance that the guide will be updated more often than a large publisher's printed guidebook (or its electronic edition) might be.

A good example of a self-published e-book from an author who's devoted to her topic is Venice for Rookies, by Bianca Reyes.

Ms. Reyes, a former event coordinator for the International Monetary Fund, decided to write her own electronic guidebook to Venice after moving to the city in 2008. The resulting e-book draws on her twin passions--Venice and budget travel--and contains 170 pages of useful information on everything from restaurants and bars to self-guided walking tours.

As you can see from the following snippet, Bianca Reyes is an engaging writer with a sense of humor:

Ms. Reyes is also an author who believes in delivering value for money, as you can tell by browsing this list of topics in Venice for Rookies:

Venice for Rookies is available online at www.travelrookies.com, from Amazon, or from iTunes.

The price is US $9.99, or about the same as you'd pay for e-books from mainstream publishers. Formats include PDF and EPUB or MOBI with or without photos.

(A chart on the Travelrookies.com Web site will help you select the right format for your laptop, tablet, smartphone, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, or other device.)