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Venice for families: insider tips

The best ideas, from hitching a cheap ride on a gondola to chilling at the Lido

Venice can work for families, but my advice is take plenty of money, and spend it all with love and foresight. Two life-enhancing hours in a gondola or speedboat may be expensive, but when you're shelling out €80 for a 40-minute ride, remember it's only the price of a game console or a lacklustre family trip to a pizza joint in suburbia back home. But you'll be even better off remembering that children love public transport almost as much. The vaporetto (water bus) is cheap and the gondola experience costs €0.50 when you take the traghetto, the gondola ferry from a choice of points across the Grand Canal. There are seven crossings, all marked on maps, such as Sofia (near Ca'D'Oro) to Pescaria (the Rialto fish market) or Campo Del Traghetto to Calle Lanza (near the Salute church). All gondoliers take a turn working on the lowly traghetto once a year.

You will inevitably want to tick off the main sites, so find ways to make them more fun for kids. If your children become bored while looking round the Doge's Palace, insist they inspect the Bocca della Verita – the Mouth of Truth – and make much of the myth that a liar's hand, placed in the lion's mouth, will be bitten off. Examine Canova's bizarre pyramid-shaped tomb in the Frari church with its sinister open doorway. Sit the children on the stone lion in Piazzetta dei Leoncini by the Basilica for photos. Play the Lion Game – the winged lion is the symbol of Venice and you can see them all over the city, particularly around San Marco, so get them to spot 10 winged lions to win an ice-cream. The view from the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore on the island of the same name is spectacular, better than from the campanile of San Marco and without the queues.

 

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