Here are the available villas for rental in Venice.

Review by Mary from Harrogate

The Lido is so different from Venice itself, a great sea side with hip beach bars and great value restaurants. My party wa myself and two daughters, age range 24-55, and we all loved it!

Review by Pam from Emsworth, Hants

Venice is unique - everyone walks or floats - the absence of cars and the resulting comparative 'peace' is remarkable. That said, the number of tourists in the main areas created traffic jams and frustrations of their own. It was better to walk around in the early morning or after dark - although away from the tourist traps (St. Marks and the Rialto) it was fine.

A VeniceCard was definitely an advantage, simplifying hopping onto a waterbus wherever and whenever we felt like it.

Review by peter from liverpool

this is my 3rd trip to venice ,I cant get enough,the place is awesome.Every road and canal has a little gem of architecture.Its fascinating to watch how life goes on,on canals with emergency services,funerals and even empying bins.The shops and restaurants are excellent and the vaporetta is a must and for 20 euros for 36 hours good value.

The merchants in Venice

The gondola has claims to being the most romantic mode of transport in the world.
According to Venetian legend - admittedly not always a reliable source - the first gondola was created when a crescent moon fell out of the sky to provide an impromptu boat for a pair of lovers.
But, for many modern gondola-riders, a journey in one amounts to a romantic moment not untinged with anxiety.
Is the gondola a phoney contraption? Is one being ripped off? Has one fallen into a tourist trap?
'Venetians do hire gondolas,' says Marco, one of the gondoliers beside the luxurious Bauer-Grunwald Hotel in the Campo San Moise, 'but only when they have visitors staying with them.'
He is obliged to admit that almost all gondola passengers are tourists.
There are 405 gondoliers in Venice. The number is fixed by the town council though it is stretched by the addition of about 60 registered 'substitutes' - gondoliers-in-waiting who have passed their exams but have yet to gain a full licence.
They stand in for any official gondoliers who are absent.
The gondoliers operate from a series of designated 'Servizio Gondole' sites around the city: there are large stands along the Grand Canal and Riva degli Schiavoni, and smaller ones in the little Rios running off them.
These stations are marked by green signs which, in this most commercial of cities, bear the logo of the gondoliers' sponsor - a company called Paul & Shark Yachting, which, rather confusingly, sells neither yachts nor sharks but is a leisure-wear manufacturer.
The connection is just one sign that the profession is far from backward-looking. ... more

The hidden secrets of la Serenissima

Where do writers get their ideas? Novelists can be vague about what sparks the beginnings of a book - but Daphne du Maurier knew exactly what inspired her finest short story.
She had taken a trip to Torcello, the largely deserted island on the fringes of the Venetian lagoon.
While she was having an alfresco lunch in the sunny garden of the Locanda Cipriani (it's still well worth taking the time to make the journey for a meal), du Maurier recalled observing a young couple at a neighbouring table.
'They looked so handsome and beautiful and yet they seemed to have a terrible problem and I watched them with sadness,' the novelist wrote later.
'The young man tried to cheer his wife up but to no avail and it struck me perhaps that their child had died of meningitis.'
A curious intuition, but du Maurier was able to spin this slender observation into literary gold. She named the couple John and Laura Baxter and they became the central characters of Don't Look Now.
For some cities, you need to pack a guidebook. The museums of Paris, for example, or the classical antiquities of Greece will make little sense without the detailed notes of a glossy Dorling Kindersley or a Blue Guide.
For other places, you would do best to take a novel. E M Forster's A Room With A View brings Florence alive, and you would be mad to contemplate a visit to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona without taking Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
And nothing quite summons up the ambience of out-of-season Venice as Don't Look Now.
In Penguin's du Maurier short stories collection, Don't Look Now runs to fewer than 50 pages, but each time I read them I am effortlessly transported to the deserted backstreets of la Serenissima.
Guidebooks lay out the menu of a place, as it were, but they don't usually tell you what to eat. With a copy of Don't Look Now in your hand, du Maurier can guide you through her Venice. It's a pleasure worth lingering over. ... more