Every tourist gets lost. If it’s not always part of the fun or part of the plan, it’s nearly always part of the trip. But in Venice, it is part of the magic. Even native Venetians fall prey to the endlessly inventive twists and trails, the dark narrow lanes, the dead-end passageways that suddenly — impossibly! — turn out not to end after all, but to lead left, or right, or back around, ever further into the maze.
It’s the canals of Venice, with their sharp-bladed gondolas and colorful gondoliers, that get all the press; they lap and glisten and preen for the cameras, and none can deny that they make the place uniquely lovely. But it’s the streets that make it mysterious, and offer a furtive and secretive beauty of their own. When you go there, by all means have your gondola ride; by all means see the great paintings of the Gallerie Accademia, and the old globes and maps in the Palazzo Ducal. Stand in the vast square of San Marco, with the twenty million pigeons (and half as many corn vendors). But don’t neglect, at some point, to turn away from the Cathedral and its crowds, abandon the Rialto and its shops, and point your feet down an alley that offers nothing but shadows, and at its end another alley. Yes, you will lose your way. Venice will find you another.
The city is divided into six neighborhoods, or sestieri: they are Cannaregio, Castello, Santa Croce, San Polo, San Marco, and Dorsoduro. If like most visitors you arrive by train, Cannaregio is where your feet will first touch Venice. They’ll take you down the broad stairway of Stazione Santa Lucia, and again if you’re like most, on to the busy vaporetto terminal. (Or if your gold card is golder than most, to the water-taxi stands.) The vaporetti, seemingly the only noisy creatures in this car-free paradise, are large motorboats that carry 70 or 80 people at a time, plying a dizzying array of varied routes — up and down the Grand Canal, skirting the city’s outer shores, or veering off across open water to the islands.
The key to a good arrival in Venice is to have an idea of where you are going.
This is not a hunt-and-peck kind of town. If you grab the first vaporetto to come along, or bound off heedlessly into the tangle of Cannaregio, expecting to "see" your hotel or come upon it in some obvious place, you are most likely in for trouble: except for the pricey real estate overlooking the Grand Canal or the Bacino di San Marco, there are no obvious places. Most of Venice is hidden in its own nooks and crannies. Get directions from the hotel when you make your reservation — preferably with the number of the vaporetto line, the name of the stop, and a map for the rest. Failing that, inquire at the tourist office in the station before venturing into town.
A second key is to travel light. Bulky vaporettos don’t venture into the inner canals of the town, so once you’ve alighted at your stop you’ll generally have a bit of a hike ahead. Those massive wheeled Samsonites, so impressive as they whoosh like freight trains through the airport, seem suddenly absurd when confronted with a 16th-century footbridge. (And there are 400 bridges in Venice.) Pack what you’re happy to carry for six blocks, and to cart up and down several flights of steps.
At some point, and hopefully on the same day as your arrival, you will find your hotel. To ensure that you can repeat the trick, once you’ve unpacked and before launching yourselves back into the streets, take stock of where you are. This mostly means calculating your distance and direction from the Grand Canal, the only "main drag" in Venice. As a counterpoint, determine your attitude in relation to the Rialto Bridge, which bisects the Grand Canal at very nearly the center of town. The third touchstone is of course is the enormous Cathedral San Marco and its equally enormous pigeon-filled .jpg)
piazza. Fixing your hotel’s location vis-a-vis these landmarks will be vastly helpful, not because you can see them from anywhere — you can’t — but because all over Venice kindly souls have scribbled directions on the walls pointing out that it’s this dark, narrow, blind passageway, rather than that one, which will lead you back to the world of sidewalk cafes and souvenir stands. These chalk-written advisories may be kindly but are not altogether altruistic: one of the economic rules of Venice is that a capuccino costs 7000 lira if you know where you are, 3500 if you don’t.
Which only provides another reason, once you’ve achieved basic orientation, to tuck it in your back pocket and proceed to get lost. The warren of San Polo, into which you delve when you cross the Rialto going away from San Marco, is very good for this; the older, largely untouristed Castello sestiere is even better (exit the Piazza San Marco from behind the Cathedral, moving away from the waterfront — that’s right, the direction no one else is going). Set yourself an obscure goal: to find the fascinating but little-seen medieval paintings in the Scuolo di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni gallery, for example, or the captured Athenian lions perched before the entrance to the naval arsenal. Or try the simplest game of all: walk until you’ve reached a grand fondamenta — in other words, the edge of Venice — then turn around and walk to the opposite end of the city, without using the Rialto. There are two other bridges which cross the Grand Canal… will you find them?
You’ll find much else in any event. Lion’s-head doorknobs and hidden gardens; time-streaked gods of stone protecting half-submerged boat launches, from which no boat has launched since a Medici was pope. Sad deserted buildings gradually sinking into the sea, slow and certain as time itself. Renaissance palaces crumbling and boarded up, save for a balcony at the very top, where flowerpots bloom and a lace curtain flutters. Sleeping cats in a shop window, homoerotic dinnerware arrayed in another. Both shops closed in midafternoon — inner Venice keeps its own time. Occasionally you cross paths with other strays: at an intersection you meet the same British couple for the third time in half-an-hour. "Lost as we are, are you?" he inquires. You nod. "Been two weeks in this bit ourselves," he adds cheerfully, then rambles off with a determined step.
At night it’s even better, and even quieter. These streets are among the safest in Europe; Venice is well-policed, and it helps that criminals face the same daunting topography as everyone else: where nothing travels in a straight line for more than a hundred yards, flight is almost a humorous concept. Street lighting is prevalent but haphazard — a 700-year-old do it yourself project. A lonely hanging lantern may appear in a passageway just as you need it; then you turn a corner, and its rays fade and disappear just as you need them more. But you begin to realize that something odd has happened; you are finding your way around. You know this street, you know this corner, you remember that square. Navigating the backstreets of Venice involves less a sense of direction than a sense of shape and smell, sound and shadow. The corners, bridges, alleys, and doorways that looked all alike this morning have slowly become signposts, each as distinctive as a thought or a phrase, nothing alike at all. You understand now that you were never really lost in the streets of Venice; you were just in the pages of an old book, learning to read.
"…suddenly we found ourselves in a stange, unknown place…all was silent with a silence that seemed to have survived from bygone times, made deeper still by the shrill notes of a flute incessantly playing an alien Eastern melody. We both stopped still, gazing… the closed, dumb, wretched houses, the barred windows from which no face looked out, the deserted street. Far and wide no sound was to be heard except the monotonous lament of the flute… We searched in vain for the name of the street; it was not marked in the usual place. I believe we shall never find that spot again, never hear the little flute’s long-drawn-out Eastern melody, quavering through the empty streets…"
– From "A Literary Guide to Venice: Seven Walking Tours" by Ian Littlewood, quoting the memoirs of Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis Hohenloe, a native-born Venetian. If you’re going to be in Venice and plan to wander the inner streets, do not go without this wonderful book – read it as you walk and discover wonderful secrets about the old city and its colorful past.
