Venice Film Festival & Activity Guide
This August 30th, the 80th Venice International Film Festival will be in town, bringing in an influx of visitors and events until Saturday, September 9th when the festival comes to an end. Whether you will be in town for the festival, find yourself in Venice this summer, or are planning a future visit to Venice, take a look at our short guide of “must dos” for your time in “The Floating City.”
Basilica di San Marco
Piazza San Marco
With a profusion of domes and more than 8000 sq metres of luminous mosaics, Venice's cathedral is unforgettable. It was founded in the 9th century to house the corpse of St Mark after wily Venetian merchants smuggled it out of Egypt in a barrel of pork fat. When the original building burnt down in 932 Venice rebuilt the basilica in its own cosmopolitan image, with Byzantine domes, a Greek cross layout and walls clad in marble from Syria, Egypt and Palestine.
Palazzo Ducale
Piazzetta San Marco 1
Holding pride of place on the waterfront, this pretty Gothic confection may be an unlikely setting for the political and administrative seat of a great republic, but it's an exquisitely Venetian one. Beyond its dainty colonnades and geometrically patterned facade of white Istrian stone and pale pink Veronese marble lie grand rooms of state, the doge's private apartments and a large complex of council chambers, courts and prisons.
Galleria dell’Accademia
Campo de la Carità 1050
Venice's historic gallery traces the development of Venetian art from the 14th to 19th centuries, with works by all of the city's artistic superstars. The complex housing the collection maintained its serene composure for centuries until Napoleon installed his haul of art trophies here in 1807 – looted from various religious institutions around town. Since then, there’s been nonstop visual drama on its walls.
Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute
Campo de la Salute 1
Baldassare Longhena's magnificent basilica is prominently positioned near the entrance to the Grand Canal, its white stones, exuberant statuary and high domes gleaming spectacularly under the sun. The church makes good on an official appeal by the Venetian Senate directly to the Madonna in 1630, after 80,000 Venetians had been killed by plague. The Senate promised the Madonna a church in exchange for her intervention on behalf of Venice – no expense or effort spared.
Ca’ Rezzonico
Fondamenta Rezzonico 3136
Baroque dreams come true at this Baldassare Longhena–designed Grand Canal palazzo (mansion), where a marble staircase leads to a vast gilded ballroom and sumptuous salons filled with period furniture, paintings, porcelain and mesmerizing ceiling frescoes, four of which were painted by Giambattista Tiepolo. The building was largely stripped of its finery when the Rezzonico family departed in 1810, but this was put right after the city acquired it in 1935 and refurnished it with pieces salvaged from other decaying palaces.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Calle San Cristoforo 701
After losing her father on the Titanic, heiress Peggy Guggenheim became one of the great collectors of the 20th century. Her palatial canal side home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, showcases her stockpile of surrealist, futurist and abstract expressionist art, with works by up to 200 artists, including her ex-husband Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock (among her many rumored lovers), Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.
Museo Correr
Piazza San Marco 52
Napoleon pulled down an ancient church to build his royal digs over Piazza San Marco, and then filled them with the riches of the doges while taking some of Venice's finest heirlooms to France as trophies. When he lost Venice to the Austrians, Empress Sissi remodeled the palace, adding ceiling frescoes, silk cladding and brocade curtains. It's now open to the public and full of many of Venice's reclaimed treasures, including ancient maps, statues, cameos and four centuries of artistic masterpieces.
Scuola Grande di San Rocco
Campo San Rocco 3052
Everyone wanted the commission to paint this building dedicated to St Roch, patron saint of the plague-stricken, so Tintoretto cheated: instead of producing sketches like rival Veronese, he gifted a splendid ceiling panel of the saint, knowing it couldn't be refused, or matched by other artists. This painting still crowns the Sala dell'Albergo, upstairs, and Tintoretto's work completely covers the walls and ceilings of all the main halls.
Giudecca Island
There are tourists in Venice even at this lowest of low seasons. But few of them make it over to Giudecca. It involves a boat ride, and apart from Palladio’s Redentore and Le Zitelle churches, there is ‘nothing to see’. Nothing, that is, except one of the few remaining bastions of utterly authentic Venetian life. That and a contemporary art scene which, in the past four or five years, has made the island something of a favorite stopover for international curators and collectors.
Contributor — Janie Weber