The line 1 ride
Forty minutes, station to San Marco — the world's greatest public-transport tour.
Martin Falbisoner — CC BY-SA 4.0 · This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. This image is not in the public domain. Please respect the copyright pr — CC BY-SA 3.0 · This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. This image is not in the public domain. Please respect the copyright pr — CC BY-SA 3.0 · This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. This image is not in the public domain. Please respect the copyright pr — CC BY-SA 3.0
Different jobs: the vaporetto shows you the whole Grand Canal for small money; the gondola is an intimate half hour in the silent side canals the vaporetto cannot enter. The right answer: line 1 for the Grand Canal, and the gondola — if you take one — for the watery back lanes.
Open seats at bow or stern; heading from the station towards San Marco, sit left for the closer famous façades and Rialto. Early morning is near-empty, sunset the best light.
Plain working gondolas ferrying across at bridge-less points — two standing minutes for pocket change, a near-free miniature gondola experience few visitors know.
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The Grand Canal is Venice's main street — four kilometres of water cutting the city in a reversed S, lined by two hundred palaces shoulder to shoulder in façades from every proud century: Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque. No city on earth has a main street like it. The best way to "walk" it is vaporetto line 1: the slow water-bus stopping at every pier from the railway station to San Marco in about forty minutes. Take the open bow or stern seats and let the palaces slide past — the cheapest great tour in Europe for the price of a transit ticket. Ride it at least twice: by day to read the façades, and after dark when chandeliers light up inside the palaces and their reflections streak the black water.
Forty minutes, station to San Marco — the world's greatest public-transport tour.
Every century's façades shoulder to shoulder on water — architecture's history in one reel.
A standing gondola ferry over the canal for small change where bridges are missing.
Canal Grande, Venice