Venice within everyone’s reach – Mattia Giusto Zanon

The challenge is to be able to spend three days in the city spending no more than 60 euros a day. It may seem impossible but it’s not, just leave the weekend alone. Visiting Venice on weekdays means being faced with another city, and certainly no worse. Starting with the options for sleeping at low prices: in the large and relatively quiet Cannaregio district there are various guest houses where you can spend 28 euros a night for a double. A suggestion could be Corte Loredana, while for those with a taste for religious institutes there are also options such as Casa Caburlotto, a centuries-old institution for nuns recently renovated and converted into a residence for short stays.

Walking towards Rialto from the station, there may immediately be an opportunity to eat something, to prepare for the rest of the day’s walks. In the calli around the famous bridge, which is an inevitable and free stop, you come across a whole constellation of bacari, wine bars that offer small-scale catering. It is the paradise of “cicchetti”, slices of bread topped with everything from lard to anchovies to cod, declined in every possible nuance, to be accompanied with a “shadow” of the house, i.e. a glass of white or red. In an area with a high rate of tourist traps, Cantina Do Mori – one of the oldest bacaro in Venice – maintains its romantic crusade in preserving tradition. So here are centuries-old bottles on the walls, copper pots and pans and a riot of cicchetti, omelettes, meatballs, eggs with anchovies and “postage stamps”, tiny square sandwiches that are a specialty of the house.

After the snack, continue towards Piazza San Marco, overlooked by two of the main jewels of the city: Palazzo Ducale and the Basilica of San Marco, according to Stendhal “the first mosque you meet going east”. Once in the square, the image is not the best: waiting for the visitors, more than the dreamlike atmospheres of The new pope by Sorrentino are eternal works in progress. They’re securing the basilica from flooding with gleaming glass barriers, but things have been slow for months.

Palazzo Ducale is already boundless to see it from the outside, but only by entering it do you realize what Venice must have been like under the Serenissima, that immense political and military bandwagon that governed lands up to the Syrian coasts. What is surprising, in addition to the magnificence of power, is its segmentation: those who complain about Italian bureaucracy today should visit the classrooms, rooms and small rooms of this building, each with its own precise and irreplaceable function, at least according to the respective officials who occupied them. In the senate there is a clock with twenty-four hours and a single hand. Looking at it better, we realize that the numbers are placed in counterclockwise order. There is no apparent reason, just to point out that in Venice many things work the other way around. The ticket for Palazzo Ducale is expensive (25 euros), but you also have access to the Correr museum, the prisons and the Marciana library.

At a certain time, walking around the square and on Riva degli Schiavoni, one notices something unexpected: on weekdays Venice is empty in the evening. There are less than 50,000 residents of the centre, the commuters have already left and not many tourists stay over. When you meet someone, you smile. At six in the afternoon on a Wednesday even the Florian – probably the oldest café in the world, dates back to 1720 – has its doors barred. At this same time, however, the wine bars in the Rialto market area begin to come alive. Sarde in saor (ie fried and seasoned with sweet and sour onions, pine nuts and raisins), schie (shrimp from the lagoon), black cuttlefish with polenta, a quarter of white and dinner is done. At the table of the Cantina do Spade one rejoices for having eaten with 20 euros in an excellent way.

In the morning, if it’s the carnival period, you have to start with the frìtoe, the pancakes, which in Venice are the size of a fist. With zabaglione, with cream or Venetian, i.e. with raisins and covered in sugar, whose simplicity makes them win hands down. Two recommended pastry shops are Dal Mas and Tonolo, both centuries-old shops.

Walking through the San Polo district, you come across an impressive out of scale. It is the basilica of the Frari, the Franciscans, who rivaled the Dominicans of Saints John and Paul for the grandeur of their respective flagships. Campo San Polo is the largest after Piazza San Marco. Initially intended for crops and pastures, it was then paved, becoming the playful environment of the city, that of parties and games, even the most extreme, such as bull hunting, witnessed by a very colorful canvas by Joseph Heintz the younger, kept in the museum I will run. Of these customs, only a rather modest ice skating rink for children now survives in winter.

From the parts of San Marco, crossing the wooden bridge of the Accademia on foot, the fourth over the Grand Canal, you arrive at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. It is the museum wanted by the last “dogaressa”. She was excessive in everything: she wore large bizarrely shaped glasses and was taken around Venice on a gondola. She was the heiress of the American dynasty of the same name which gives its name to the museums of New York and Bilbao. In Venice Peggy Guggenheim left a collection unique in the world in an even more unique building, because it is the most famous unfinished building in the city. It is located in Dorsoduro and is Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, or rather the ground floor of what should have been. The patron lived there, among the Picassos in the dining room, the canvases of Max Ernst (who was her second husband), the sculptures of Alexander Calder and an incredible Empire of lights by René Magritte, in front of which to pass the hours dazed. The entrance ticket (16 euros) is an obligatory item in our daily budget.

And if you have literary passions, who said that even on a low-cost trip it’s not possible to sit at a table at Harry’s bar? One of the few places in the world that says “hemingway used to come here” where Ernest Hemingway really went. We also have traces of it, and an entire novel, Across the River and into the Trees. There are two options for entering this magical place and not leaving submerged in bills of exchange: being a teetotaler or aiming for the cafeteria. Hot tea is a great way to linger people-watching. If you’re lucky, you’ll snag one of Hemingway’s favorite corner tables.

The last day is dedicated to the Jewish quarter. It is located in Cannaregio. The term “ghetto”, later used in many other parts of the world to refer to similar neighborhoods, seems to come from here. Getto was the Venetian name for “foundry”. And there were plenty of them in the area. Of the five synagogues of the different rites, only two are still in operation, the Sephardic ones. The Spanish synagogue of Longhena is a treasure trove of decadent opulence. Judaism’s places of worship often contain a deliberate error, a symbol of human fallibility. Here, in the two-tone floor near the altar, the design of the tiles doesn’t add up and the motif suddenly becomes irregular. Next to the sacred wardrobe, a small plaque commemorates an event of 1849: from Marghera the Austrians dropped a bomb on Venice, which hit this very place: it was a Friday evening, in the middle of Shabbat, the synagogue was full. The rabbi had it written: “On that day a bomb fell here, he entered with violence, but judiciously”. Incredibly, everyone came out unscathed.