The Doge’s Palace

The seat of the Venetian government for a thousand years, and an argument in stone: the heavy part is on top and the open arcade is underneath, which is the reverse of how a building is supposed to work and is why it looks like nothing else.

Inside are the council chambers, the armoury, the prisons, and Tintoretto’s Paradise — at seven by twenty-two metres, one of the largest paintings on canvas anywhere.

What it costs

Ticketed, and ⚠️ you cannot buy a ticket for the palace alone. It is sold as a combined ticket with the Museo Correr and the other museums on the square, so you are paying for four institutions whether or not you enter them.

The Secret Itineraries tour of the attic prisons and the interrogation rooms is a separate booking and sells out days ahead.

The combined ticket is also the cheapest way into the Museo Correr, which most people skip and which holds the city’s own collection of itself — including Jacopo de’ Barbari’s enormous woodcut map of 1500, showing a Venice you can still navigate by.

When to go

At opening, or in the last two hours. The staircase and the first chambers are a bottleneck and the route is one-way, so a slow group ahead of you cannot be passed.

Allow two hours, more with the Secret Itineraries.

Getting there

San Zaccaria or San Marco Vallaresso. The entrance is on the water side, not from the square — the Porta della Carta beside the basilica is the exit.

If you only have an hour

The Sala del Maggior Consiglio, and the Bridge of Sighs from the inside, which is smaller and darker than the outside suggests and has two small windows a condemned man could see the lagoon through.

What people get wrong

Photographing the Bridge of Sighs from the Ponte della Paglia with everyone else, and not realising the palace is what you should be looking at.