The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Venice: the practicalities
The historic centre of Venice is made up of 118 islands, most of which began life as
a micro-community, each with a parish church or two, and a square for public meetings.
Though many Venetians maintain a strong attachment to their particular part of
the city, the autonomy of these parishes has been eroded since the days when traffic
between them moved by water. Some 400 bridges now tie the islands together, forming
an amalgamation that’s divided into six large administrative districts known as sestieri,
three on each side of the Canal Grande.
The sestiere of San Marco is the zone where the majority of the essential sights are clustered,
and is accordingly the most expensive and most crowded district of the city. On the
east it’s bordered by Castello, and on the north by Cannaregio – both of which become more
residential, and poorer and quieter, the further you go from San Marco. On the other bank the
largest of the sestieri is Dorsoduro, which stretches from the fashionable quarter at the tip of
the Canal Grande, south of the Accademia gallery, to the docks in the west. Santa Croce,
named after a now demolished church, roughly follows the curve of the Canal Grande from
Piazzale Roma to a point just short of the Rialto, where it joins the commercially most active of
the districts on this bank – San Polo.
venice: the Practicalities
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Points of arrival
Millions of visitors pour into Venice each year,
most of them funnelled through Venice’s small
Marco Polo airport, on the outskirts of Venice
itself, or through Treviso, 30km inland. Arriving
by train and coach is painless – but driving
into Venice is unmitigated hell in summer.
By air
Most scheduled flights and some charters
arrive at the recently enlarged and smartened
Marco Polo, around 7km north of
Venice, on the edge of the lagoon. If you’re
on a package holiday the cost of transport
to the city centre, either by land or by
water, might already be covered. If it’s not,
the most inexpensive alternative is to take
one of the two road-going bus services to
the terminal at Piazzale Roma: the ATVO
(Azienda Trasporti Veneto Orientale) coach,
which departs every half-hour and takes
around twenty minutes (e3), or the ACTV
(Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano;
wwww.actv.it) bus #5/5D, which is equally
frequent, usually takes just five minutes
longer (it’s a local bus service, so it picks
up and puts down passengers between the
airport and Piazzale Roma), and costs e2. If
you’d prefer to approach the city by water,
you could take one of the Alilaguna waterbuses,
which operate on three routes, and
all take about an hour to reach San Marco:
Murano (e6) – Lido – Arsenale – San Marco
– Záttere (all e12; service hourly 6.15am–
12.15am); Murano – Fondamente Nove
(e6) – Lido – San Zaccaria – San Marco
(hourly 9.45am–11.45pm); and directly to
Addresses in Venice
Within each sestiere the buildings are numbered in a sequence that makes sense
solely to the functionaries of the post office – it’s possible to find houses facing each
other which have numbers separated by hundreds. This is because, in essence, the
numbering system tends to follow walls rather than streets: thus if a small alleyway
intersects with a major one the numbering on the major alley may well continue
round the corner and down the minor alleyway before turning around to flow back
towards the main drag. For this reason Venetian addresses are conventionally
written as the street name followed by the sestiere followed by the number – eg
Calle Vallaresso, San Marco 1312. Sometimes, though, the sestiere is placed before
the street, and sometimes the street is omitted altogether, which makes the place
impossible to find unless you’re in the know.
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