All roads in Venice seem to lead to, or through, San Marco. Once you’ve given it the attention it deserves, San Polo and Dorsoduro fit neatly into a day together. That still leaves Castello, Cannaregio and Santa Croce, plus the island of Giudecca just across the water, and this is where we found some of our favourite quiet corners of the city.
These are the places we explored in each, from a waterfront stroll and a secret view of the Rialto Bridge to a cosy dinner we’d go back for tomorrow.
Walk east along the Riva degli Schiavoni into everyday Castello, explore Cannaregio after dark, eat in Santa Croce, and take a morning on Giudecca for views back across to Venice.
We set out to explore Castello after a morning tour of the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s Basilica, walking east along the long waterfront promenade of the Riva degli Schiavoni.
At first there’s a lot going on, with tourists, seagulls, souvenir stalls and vaporetto stops all jostling for space. But the further you walk from St Mark’s Square, the quieter it gets. The promenade takes its name from the traders of Dalmatia, known as Schiavoni, who moored their boats here, and it has been a busy spot for boats for centuries, as Canaletto’s paintings show.
Just past the corner of the Doge’s Palace, you pass the Bridge of Sighs, the famous Hotel Danieli, the leaning bell tower of San Giorgio dei Greci (best seen from the Ponte della Pietà) and the Naval Museum.
Via Giuseppe Garibaldi was created in the early 1800s under Napoleon by filling in a canal. Today it’s a wide, lively street with plenty of perfectly good cafés and restaurants. There’s no need to book here. Just pick somewhere you like the look of with a free table outside, and watch the world go by.
This is Venice as a real neighbourhood, with children playing in the squares and washing strung across the streets. One side street off Via Garibaldi was criss-crossed with washing lines, and made for a classic Venetian photo.
From Via Garibaldi, take the short walk along Viale Garibaldi, a shady tree-lined avenue, and look for the turtles in the water at the bottom of the Garibaldi monument. Along the way there’s Serra dei Giardini, a lovely glass conservatory café full of plants. It looked very tempting, but it was also very busy.
Castello is also home to the Art Biennale, a sort of Art Olympics where countries create exhibits around a shared theme. Its two main sites are the Giardini, public gardens laid out under Napoleon, and the Arsenale, the Republic’s old shipyards.
If it’s an Art Biennale year, allow a couple of hours for the Giardini pavilions. It gets busy, so go mid-afternoon or first thing to miss the worst of the crowds. If you have time, the Arsenale exhibits show you where Venice built its ships. Our guide to Venice with teenagers explains how we did the Biennale as a family.
We only went into Cannaregio twice on our trip. The first time was to catch the vaporetto from Fondamente Nove for our day trip to Murano and Burano, with the Alps in full view across the lagoon. The second was for an evening ghost walk. The stops below are all easy to find on your own, but if you’d like the stories told properly, our Venice with teenagers guide has the tour we booked.
Our walk started in Campo San Bartolomeo, a long, narrow square just by the Rialto Bridge, with a statue of the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni in the middle. It’s still in San Marco, but it’s a popular meeting point for locals and tours alike. From there, head north along the Salizada San Giovanni Grisostomo into Cannaregio.
Along the Salizada, look for the entrance to the Sotoportego del Remer and follow it through to the Corte del Remer, which opens onto the Grand Canal. From the water’s edge you get one of the best unobstructed views of the Rialto Bridge, without any crowds to jostle with. You’re directly opposite the Rialto Mercato vaporetto stop here.
Head back to the Salizada and look for a small archway across the lane into Corte Prima del Milion. The house here is said to be where Marco Polo was born and lived before he made his fortune. There’s no plaque on it.
Next, follow the passageway to the site of the Polo family home after Marco returned from his travels, by then a wealthy man. This time there’s a plaque, though the building is now the Teatro Malibran, as the original house was lost to fire. Our guide told us that this is where Marco Polo’s wife is thought to have drowned in the canal, and that her ghost can sometimes be heard singing. So they say!
Finish at the huge Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Our guide told us a grisly legend about the doorway: that the man who designed it slept on the church steps until it was finished, and one night saw a murderer escaping from a house opposite carrying a heart. Carvings in the marble around the door are said to be linked to what he saw.
We only saw a small corner of Cannaregio, the eastern part next to San Marco and Castello. With more time, these are the places I’d go next. We haven’t visited them yet, so this is researched rather than first-hand:
The area that gave the world the word ghetto, with synagogues and a museum telling its long history.
A Gothic church packed with Tintoretto’s work, near the house where he lived.
Rather than a gondola ride, you learn to row a traditional Venetian boat yourself, standing up, on the quieter canals. It gets strong reviews from families with older kids, and you book directly with the operator.
Canal-side streets that come alive in the evening, with bars and restaurants that locals recommend for sunset and a bite to eat.
We only spent one evening in Santa Croce, but it was a lovely one. We wandered from the Rialto Bridge through a maze of tiny alleys and canals, which was quiet and delightful, and stopped for an aperitivo before dinner at La Zucca (the pumpkin).
La Zucca sits beside a pretty bridge over a canal. It’s cosy, and the food was delicious. It isn’t a vegetarian restaurant, but it has very good vegetarian and seasonal dishes. Book ahead: people were being turned away all evening because it was full. Afterwards, you can catch the vaporetto from San Stae back towards San Marco.
If you’re in Santa Croce at lunchtime, Il Refolo, near the pretty Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, is a good spot for canal-side dining. You could also go and see the Ponte della Costituzione, the only modern bridge over the Grand Canal, by the railway station. Not much is new in Venice, so it’s a novelty, even if plenty of locals aren’t fans.
Giudecca sits just across the water from Dorsoduro, and it’s easy to overlook. We went one morning, catching vaporetto Line 2 from San Zaccaria, near St Mark’s Square, to the Zitelle stop. From there we walked along the fondamenta, the waterfront path, with lovely views back across the Giudecca Canal.
Our walk took us past the Redentore, Palladio’s great white church with its two slender towers, which we’d been admiring from all over the city and from our hotel across the water. It was a lovely stroll, with water lapping at the edge of the path, locals coming and going, and lots of little cafés and pasticcerie.
Oddly, it felt as though there were fewer tourists on Giudecca, despite two very grand hotels: the Hilton Molino Stucky, in a converted flour mill at the western end, and the Belmond Hotel Cipriani at the eastern end.
It was also the only place in Venice where we saw a “Tourists go home” sign, a reminder of the pressure the city is under. Our guide to visiting Venice responsibly goes into that in more detail.
We were on Giudecca for a mask-making workshop in an old brewery that’s now home to artists’ workshops. When we left through the back gates, we found ourselves beside a small canal full of fishing boats. Just outside, on the wall of the women’s prison, was the Vatican’s pavilion for the 2024 Art Biennale: Maurizio Cattelan’s huge mural of two bare feet, called Father. It was a temporary piece for that year’s Biennale, but a striking and slightly controversial sight while it lasted.
We ran out of time to explore Giudecca further before our flight home, and caught vaporetto Line 4.2 back towards St Mark’s. At lunchtime the boat was absolutely rammed and sitting very low in the water. Nobody seemed the least bit worried, and the locals chatted away the whole time. It was gloriously chaotic.
In closing
We loved wandering these neighbourhoods, and only wish we'd had more time.
Even though none of them is very big, we barely scratched the surface; they're simply packed with things to find. If you want to get beyond the crowds of San Marco, this is where to start.
For another quieter route, try our self-guided walking tour through San Polo and Dorsoduro.s
We shall return...
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