About

What this site is

Access Venice is a guide to the practical half of visiting Venice: how the boats work, what is actually free, when things are shut, who has to pay the access fee, and which of the famous names is worth its ticket. It is written for visitors — of whom there are around twenty million a year, against a resident population of about forty-nine thousand.

The argument it makes

Venice gives you the city for nothing and charges you for the water. Walking it — which is the actual experience, and the only one that is any good — is free, and so are ten of the sixteen sight pages here, St Mark’s Basilica among them. What costs is every alternative to walking: the vaporetto, the gondola at a fixed municipal tariff, the water taxi. And since 2024 there is a charge simply to arrive on a busy day.

How it is written — including the part about AI

Articles on this site are drafted with the help of a large language model and reviewed before they are published. We say so plainly because you are entitled to know how what you are reading was made.

What that means in practice: the structure, the argument and the editorial judgement are ours; a model does a share of the drafting; and every factual claim that a reader might act on is checked against a primary source before it goes up. Where we cannot verify something, we say we cannot rather than writing around it.

Why there are almost no prices here

Venice’s charges move faster than almost anywhere in this series. The day-visitor access fee began as a trial in 2024 and its rate, its charged days and its booking window have all been adjusted since; museum admissions changed in 2024; vaporetto fares rise most years. A price published today would be wrong within months, and a wrong price is worse than none — so the pages describe the mechanism (what a pass covers, what is a separate ticket, what a tariff is set by) and send you to the operator for the number.

Photographs

The photographs are from Wikimedia Commons, used under their licences, and each one carries its photographer and licence beneath it. Where a picture would have needed a caption to explain why it is here, we found a different picture.

Corrections

Everything is dated. If something here is wrong — particularly if we have described a mechanism wrongly rather than just quoted a stale figure — we would rather know. Corrections are made on the page and noted.

How it earns

Advertising, and a small number of affiliate links which are marked as such. An affiliate link never changes what we recommend or what we say about it; the sight pages carry none at all.