About Access Venice

What this site is

Twenty sights in Venice, one page each, and eleven sections on how the city works: arriving by air, rail and road, moving on foot and by water, the six sestieri, the islands of the lagoon, the seasons and the tides, what to eat and drink, where to stay, what to book ahead, itineraries from one day to a week, and day trips into the Veneto. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how to visit it, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a legend rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What Venice means here

This site keeps to the historic city of Venice, the six sestieri on their islands in the middle of the lagoon, with the Giudecca, San Giorgio Maggiore and the islands of the lagoon, Murano, Burano, Torcello and the Lido among them. The municipality of Venice also includes Mestre and the mainland across the lagoon, which appears on the pages about arriving and where to stay rather than as a sight, and the cities of the Veneto appear on the day trips page.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or leaves the number out.

Access Venice is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The site was rebuilt in 2026. Articles published on the earlier version of the site were checked again against their sources and kept at their original addresses in the journal.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled Venice show a casino replica, a town of the same name in another country, a painting of the city or a place on the mainland, so each one is checked before it is used.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a sight carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission.