Venice in winter: Why you should wait until the off-season to visit Italy’s floating city
A matter of minutes after arriving in Venice, I was asking myself why it had it taken me this long to visit. I’d spent summers wandering around Tuscany, returned to Rome since my teens and roamed the Dolomites twice this year alone, but until this winter Venice had firmly been on my no-go list.
And for good reason. It’s not been a great few years for Venice tourism: in 2023 we learned that the city is introducing a €5 tourist tax for day-trippers; we read stories of travellers being ripped off when buying coffees on the Grand Canal, or acting like idiots in gondolas. Plus we’re constantly being reminded that Venice is sinking (figuratively and literally) under the strain of tourism.
The sense of a beautiful city being broken by too many visitors had in all honesty put me off. I’d spent a painful 24 hours in Dubrovnik this past summer where I’d jostled through the city streets shoulder to shoulder with tourists who had just poured off a cruise ship, and it left me faintly depressed at the state of overtourism.
But it was not a broken city choked with tourists that I found in early December. Instead, the streets were quiet, the Ponte Rialto softly sparkling, the locals warm and chatty,
