Tour of Venice: How to See Venice Without Crowds of People

You can view all posts from my trip to Italy here. 

I’m still going through my thousands of photos from Italy (not an exaggeration), but I have made more progress with my photos from Venice! If you’re just tuning in, my first post on Venice was Skip Expensive Gondola Rides, Try Row Venice where my group of friends and I had an amazing boat tour in the local’s area on our first day in Venice. This post is how to see Venice without crowds of people, plus the worst food and the best Airbnb in the city.

We checked into our Airbnb, which was one of my favorite places we stayed the whole trip! We stayed in Appartamento Venezia, and it was in a nice and quiet area next to a little square. (It was a little hard to find since it was off a side street, but I have a photo of the door if you decide to stay there!). The host, Viorica, was very nice and friendly and kept apologizing for her English, but we didn’t have any problems understanding her.

We had some delicious food on our boat tour, but we were still a little hungry after a long day of traveling so we decided to split some dishes. One of my least favorite things about Venice was how much they catered to tourists, especially with the food. We even went off the main touristy streets, but this dinner at Pizzeria Pasqualigo was just meh (and reading reviews afterwards said the same). I’ve had better Italian food at chain restaurants in the U.S. And I’m sure there are better restaurants in the area, but we didn’t really plan for dinner and our internet wasn’t great so we couldn’t do any research.

I knew Italy was going to be pretty touristy, but from crazy expensive gondola rides to bad food, Venice had the most tourist traps of any city we visited by far. It was also the only place that I was so overwhelmed by the crowds of tourists the following day that I felt claustrophobic and on edge looking out for pick pockets. Venice was very beautiful and I did take tons of photos, but it wasn’t my favorite place.

We did find find a pretty awesome restaurant the next day though, so not all hope for good food in Venice is lost!

No complaints about the gelato near our Airbnb! I got pomegranate and it was absolutely delicious.

After sleeping hard with our serious jetlag, we were up the next day to explore the city. There was a cafe called Osteria dei Sapori near our Airbnb that we went to both mornings, and everything we tried there was delicious and the waitresses were so nice and helpful. One remembered us the second morning and even remembered everything we had ordered the day before!

We didn’t have a set itinerary in the morning, we mostly just wandered and took tons of photos until we ended up at Piazza San Marco. We didn’t get up at the crack of dawn, but we did get up early enough to have an empty Venice all to ourselves! If you want to know how to see Venice without crowds of people (and we did run into huge crowds of people that I talk about on my second Venice post), I definitely recommend doing your sightseeing as early as you can. The streets were pretty empty in the morning but got very busy later in the day, so I wouldn’t doing much exploring in the afternoon to avoid the crowds.

Since no cars are allowed in Venice, we got to see them collecting trash on boats! I always think it’s so interesting how other cultures do daily tasks like this.

One thing I wasn’t really expecting about the bridges in Venice is that they’re all stairs. Very few have ramps, so that can make things complicated when you have heavy rolling luggage- we learned that the hard way!

The famous Rialto Bridge was so pretty and also very empty in the morning, I definitely recommend visiting it in the morning because later that day, it was so crowded that we could barely cross the bridge.

We picked up some spices and risotto to cook for dinner later, and it was delicious! The man at the stand was very helpful in explaining what was in each bag. I went for the spiciest ones 😉

There were so many pretty buildings and houses in Venice, so stay tuned for my next post with more photos with my tour of Venice! 🙂 If you’ve been to Venice before, what was your favorite sight? Comment below!