Only 36 hours in Venice? You can still have a good time. Here’s how

A ban on cruise ships. Restrictions on large tour groups. Entrance fees for day-trippers during certain high-season periods. With millions of travellers annually vying to photograph Piazza San Marco, cross Rialto Bridge and experience the canal-filled city’s other famous draws, Venice, Italy, is struggling to stem the tide. To minimise your impact (and discomfort), two tips: First, forays to more remote neighbourhoods and islands offer additional calm and turn up unexpected discoveries. Along the way, you might find upstart grand hotels, gourmet osterias, innovative new cocktail bars and a semi-secret convent garden recently opened to the public. Second, winter — with its early darkness, fog and reduced crowds — provides breathing room and deepens the mysteriousness of Venice’s narrow passageways and centuries-old buildings. One upside to visiting this coming year is Palazzo Diedo, an ambitious art centre that reopens in a restored 18th-century building in May.

FRIDAY

4pm | Discover Giudecca island

A lovely (and much-needed) green space debuted this fall when the garden (admission 12 euros, or about US$12.70) of Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, a 16th-century church, opened to the public for the first time. Tucked behind a door in an alley called Calle dei Frati on Giudecca — a long island forming the south border of Venice proper — the newly renovated and replanted gardens are filled with cypresses, olive groves, fruit trees, trellised vines, and hundreds of flowers and plants. In winter, the marquee attraction is the early sunset view over the Adriatic Sea. A cafe serves espresso (4 euros), hot chocolate (6.50 euros) and more. Other half-hidden gems around Giudecca are CREA, an arts complex in a boatyard with several exhibition spaces, and the boutique of Fortuny, a century-old fabric manufacturer, in a gated industrial complex. (Just ring the bell.)

7pm | Raid the refectory

Someone at the two-year-old restaurant Il Refettorio (translation: “The Refectory”) likes fire. Near the Scuola Grande di San Rocco — a building filled with works by Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto — the stylishly angular and modern-minded restaurant serves several dishes featuring burned or smoked ingredients. These include steaks (from 9 euros per 100 grams), flambeed scallops with lumpfish roe and charred lemon (24 euros) and smoked sole with porcini mushrooms (30 euros). Fans of forest flavours might like the foamy mushroom soup larded with shaved white truffle, pork jowl and a poached egg (28 euros), while seafood lovers should consider grilled octopus tentacles on potato foam with droplets of tomato sauce (28 euros).

10pm | Sip a discreet drink

A pair of impressive new hotel bars are reinvigorating Venice’s cocktail scene. Centrally located in a palazzo that once held the Venice stock exchange, on Calle XXII Marzo, a street of luxury boutiques, is Nolinski Venezia. The hotel contains a velvety bar lined with some 4,000 books, from Picasso: Between Cubism and Classicism to Yacht Interiors. Peruse one with a Dandolo cocktail (chocolate-infused bourbon, white vermouth and Earl Grey tea; 25 euros). More playful and (intentionally) ’80s-kitsch, the plush Experimental Cocktail Club — housed in Il Palazzo Experimental hotel, in the Dorsoduro neighbourhood — updates the Negroni with the Monsteroni (gin, Campari, vermouth, coconut oil and a cordial of stout ale; 15 euros).

SATURDAY

10am | Pick your palazzo

Long before French billionaire Francois Pinault made his big 21st-century real estate acquisitions — the opulent Palazzo Grassi town house and the former customs house known as Punta della Dogana — to showcase his contemporary art collection, and even before the 1950s opening of Peggy Guggenheim’s remarkable modern art trove, the white baroque mansion on the Grand Canal known as Ca’ Pesaro (10 euros) was the showcase for Venice’s artistic avant-garde. Opened as a modern art museum in 1902, it today houses a permanent collection that includes Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais, Gustav Klimt’s “Giuditta II” and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, along with contemporary art. Farther down the canal, Ca’ Rezzonico museum (10 euros) occupies another aristocratic white baroque mansion. Once home to poet Robert Browning, the edifice today enfolds sumptuous 18th-century period rooms decorated with ceilings painted by Giambattista Tiepolo and Venetian cityscape canvases by Canaletto.

1pm | Chomp cicchetti

Like croissants in Paris, cicchetti — small savoury bar snacks — abound in Venice, and no one agrees who does them best. One favourite spot is Adriatico Mar, a snug wine bar on the north edge of the Dorsoduro district with its own boat dock. (There is also a sidewalk entrance.) Amid beamed ceilings and antique wooden tables, devotees munch small sandwiches (3.50 to 4.50 euros) filled with ingredients like formadi frant cheese (with caramelized onion and grape jam) and pork shoulder (with mustard and radicchio). A five-minute walk leads to rustic-cool La Bottiglia, where a young team assembles overstuffed focaccia sandwiches (9 euros), including one with porchetta, caramelised onions, pumpkin cream and Gorgonzola.

3pm | Buy Venetian

The scent of pulp fills Legatoria Polliero, one of the small independent shops near Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, a red-brick Franciscan church containing paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Within, artisan Anselmo Polliero presses, cuts and binds handmade paper into tiny notebooks (8 euros), agendas (15 euros), diaries (20 euros) and even trays. The smell shifts to leather inside Declare, a chic showroom for minimalist monochrome wallets (135 euros), messenger bags (500 euros) and totes (245 euros) handmade from Florentine calf and goat skins.

5pm | Head to the hospital

Rather than brave the crowds of Piazza San Marco, consider Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a picturesque square in the Castello neighbourhood that is bordered by two monumental Renaissance buildings: The Scuola Grande di San Marco, once home to a religious brotherhood and now a hospital, features a dramatic white neoclassical facade and a grand interior hall (8 euros to visit) with coffered ceilings, huge paintings (including some by Tintoretto’s son Domenico), displays of bygone medical devices, and thousands of centuries-old illustrated anatomical and medical books. Next door, the soaring red-brick Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo contains a finely detailed panel painting by Bellini (who is buried within the church) and painted ceilings by Paolo Veronese (admission, 3.50 euros).

7.30pm | Dine in Castello

Opened in 2023, Pietra Rossa shines like a beacon of epicureanism from the quiet residential Castello neighbourhood. The simple space — wooden tables, checkerboard floor — belies the sophisticated kitchen, which employs Adriatic seafood, produce from the restaurant’s garden and a Japanese kamado charcoal grill to delicious effect. Starters include numerous bocon, one-bite concoctions like a slightly cooked oyster with watermelon gel and olive oil (6 euros), or langoustine with pork bits and porcini mushroom (8 euros). The substantial mains range from chunks of grilled amberjack in potato cream (28 euros) to sliced steak with roasted vegetables. Stay local with Dorona Criterio skin-contact wine (35 euros per bottle) from Ca’ Savio, a peninsula in the lagoon.

10pm | Go natural

An impressive natural-wine scene is gathering steam in the hip Cannaregio district. Opened in 2021, La Sete contains ample wood — ceiling, shelves, chairs, tables — and about a dozen wines by the glass. Outdoor heat lamps allow drinkers to enjoy the night air while sipping, say, a light, juicy red called Trallalla (5 euros per glass) by Agricola La Venta winery. New this year, Estro Pane e Vino is a bright, cheerful little bar with canal views and shelves loaded with some 200 types of wine — including Le Guaite di Noemi Amarone (6 euros per glass), an easy-drinking red valpolicella. And for music fans, Bea Vita often has DJs animating the evenings as customers sip offerings like Bibby (6.50 euros), a fruit-forward white made from Vespaiola grapes.

SUNDAY

10am | Uncover Jewish Venice

A dubious distinction: The word “ghetto” was first coined in Venice as a reference to the enclosed neighbourhood created in 1516 to house its Jewish population. Today the Ghetto area is still home to several centuries-old synagogues, two of which can be visited with a ticket (17 euros) from the Ghetto Venezia information office. The Sinagoga Spagnola (Spanish Synagogue) was designed by 17th-century architect Baldassare Longhena — a Catholic — who also built Ca’ Pesaro and Ca’ Rezzonico. The largest Venice synagogue, it is lined with wooden benches and contains an upper gallery for women. More finely decorated, the Sinagoga Levantina (Levantine Synagogue) was built over the 16th and 17th centuries and contains neoclassical stonework, hanging silver censers and an elaborately sculpted wooden pulpit.

Noon | Sail to Byzantium

A scenic 40-minute vaporetto voyage through the lagoon islands takes you to Torcello, probably the first island to be inhabited. En route, the line 12 vaporetto passes San Michele (a cemetery island where composer Igor Stravinsky and poet Ezra Pound are buried) and Murano (known for glass blowers) before a stop at Mazzorbo, home to the fancy Venissa restaurant and osteria. Get off at Burano and catch line 9 to Torcello, where Santa Maria Assunta (5 euros) awaits. Begun in the seventh century, the Byzantine basilica houses dazzling medieval mosaics. The soaring wall covered with mystical Last Judgment images — skulls threaded by snakes, angels in cloaks covered with eyes, the dead emerging from tombs, Christ over a river of fire — is a mesmerizing tour de force.

WHERE TO STAY

Venice Venice, an upmarket design hotel opened in 2022 in a 13th-century palazzo, offers views of the Grand Canal from many of its 43 rooms. The hotel also has an indoor-outdoor restaurant, a lifestyle boutique, and a private bar-club for guests and members. Rooms in winter start at 600 euros, or about US$634.

Opened this year after a nearly decade-long renovation, Palazzo dei Mori occupies a discreet 1400s mansion in a quiet passage. The salon and six rooms are decorated in old-world Venetian style, with gilded wood, Murano-glass chandeliers and long drapes. Rooms in winter start at 182 euros.

Short-term rental apartments abound in all of Venice’s six zones (known as sestieri). For a tranquil stay, consider one of the more peripheral districts. Castello, on the north side, is a mix of working-class residential neighbourhoods and bustling pockets of restaurants and bars. An island unto itself, Giudecca has a more local and village-y feel in spots, along with plenty of dining, historical and cultural options.

By Seth Sherwood © The New York Times

This article originally appeared in The New York Times