Postcards from Venice - Venice City Break
Venice - you stole my heart!
I first visited Venice very briefly as a teenager (many, many years ago!), and my memories of it are beautiful, but definitely a bit hazy. My husband and I recently returned from a wonderful weekend in Venice celebrating our 10 year wedding anniversary (how has it been 10 years already??) and oh my - Venice stole my heart! We spent 48 glorious hours in this incredible city and these are the things we loved:
Eating our way through Venice:
Favourite things included many, many cicchetti (small & delicious bites of food) from the multitude of tiny Venetian bars dotted everywhere across the city. Our favourites were gorgonzola & walnut and baccala (creamy codfish - my husband’s favourite).
Slices of pizza (with burrata - yum!) and pillowy olive focaccia.
Gelato - the italian ice cream is truly unrivalled. Strawberry sorbet blew my mind and pistachio & gianduja and raspberry & dark chocolate were to die for! I did my best to try as many flavours as I could...
Spritzes - the quintesential Venetian drink, available almost everywhere and for only £4-£5. Our favourite will always be the refreshing & orangey Aperol, but we also tried and liked the less sweet & more herby Select. Interestingly we’ve learned that spritzes should be served with an olive - something we’ll be certainly adopting at home!
Seafood - I’m vegetarian so my focus was on all the delicious veggies (artichokes, caponata), cheeses and polenta. My husband however made the best of all the incredible seafood that was on offer in abundance.
Strolling through Venetian streets, squares and beautiful bridges - my favourite part. Pretty much everywhere you go and everywhere you look there’s incredible beauty to see in the canals, Venetian architecture, the lighting and the very typical venetian colour pallete (shades of plaster and burnt sienna, with deep & dark green window shutters). Venice isn’t known for green spaces, however because of the presence of the canals and the lagoon that didn’t bother us at all.
Walking tour of Venice - as soon as we arrived we joined a 2 hour walking tour, to learn about the history and main attractions in Venice. The tour, led by a proud Venetian, gave us an insight into the city as our tour guide shared plenty of interesting and engaging facts not available in the guidebook.
Vaporetto (water bus) - we took vaporettos to visit two other islands in the Venetian lagoon: Murano & Burano. We got extremely lucky with the weather, it was a balmy 24 ‘C and it felt glorious to sit outside in the sunshine, dashing through the Venetian lagoon in the sea breeze. Pure bliss!
Murano & Burano - we visited both islands in a day, which was a welcome respite from the business of Venice. Murano is famous for the Murano glass, and we did witness glass blowing in action. We visited some incredible glass shops and stopped for more chichetti and spritzes in the sunshine. Burano is known for its vibrant houses, painted in vivid colours of the rainbow.
I wish we had more time in Venice, as there was so much more to explore! Our legs were grateful to go home though - we did A LOT of walking (comfy shoes were key - I quickly abandoned my sandals in favour of trainers). But that’s the thing about Venice - when a city is this beautiful, you can’t stop walking, marveling at it all.
Patti x