Anyone there familiar with Venice? We might be staying for a few days in July, and I was wondering if there were any disadvantages to staying on Lido?
We went to Venice for our honeymoon last October.
The big disadvantage about staying on Lido is it’s not near anything. Venice is the most walkable city in the world - you would need to take a vaporetto every time you wanted go back and forth from your hotel. We would walk all around the city, and stop back at the hotel several times a day, to drop off stuff, change clothes, and wash up.
Venice is way cool but abandon all of your ideas about what a city looks like. It is tiny yet almost impenetrable because it is also like walking through a medieval labyrinth. It is almost impossible not to get lost. They don’t have many true streets. Most are more like double-wide sidewalks with old buildings towering overhead branching off in all directions. If you are adventurous with food, Venice has some exotic cuisine that I love but it may be a bit too exotic for some.
Italy hasn’t actually been a country for that long. Venice was once its own small empire and it shows. There are gypsies (in the bad sense) everywhere so assume that someone is plotting to steal all of your stuff all of the time. There are restaurants and bars that cater to Americans and the British in the major squares. Stay far, far away. One of them is where I learned about the concept of a $23 watered down small mixed drink.
No one else has told me this but I found the locals impossibly rude and lazy. Other people were there to see it. I had restaurant doors forcibly slammed in my face as I walked up twice looking for lunch. Venetians feel strongly about closing restaurants for lunch because the staff needs to go home and eat. My wife and I were next in line to buy tickets for a water taxi when a little old Italian guy just walked up and pushed me as hard as he could out of the way and put his money on the counter. As I tried to figure out how far I could throw him into the Adriatic sea, my wife who is Italian American and a petite little thing threw a shoulder into him and knocked his midget 5’1" 100 pound Italian ass back where it came from.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore the place but there are some serious drawbacks especially with the Venetian locals and the whole place is filled with scams.
Don’t go when it’s really hot. The canals are open sewers and they smell like it.
We did not find the locals to be particularly rude, but it’s pretty obvious that they have “cognitive dissonance” about all the tourists. Venice gets something like 20,000,000 tourists a year, and the city only has a population of around 50,000. Which means that there are probably as many tourists as locals at any given time. Venice’s whole economy is geared toward tourism, I mean- other than some glass, they don’t actually produce anything. Still, having to put up with strangers 24/7/365 must get old.
The one time I saw a local genuinely glad to see me was when we were walking to the train station (with all of our bags). It was early in the morning, and the fruit vendor were just getting set up. As we passed one of the stalls, my wife pointed out a pigeon that was sitting on a box of grapes, eating them. I stopped, but down my bags, and walked over and shooed the pigeon away. The grocer looked over and gave me a big smile and yelled “Bravo!, Fortissimo!”
Made my day.