Berlitz Pocket Guide: Venice
Berlitz Guide: Venice book cover It's cheap, tiny, surprisingly informative, and a good bet for tourists who plan to spend only a day or two in Venice.

Fodor's Exploring Venice
Tim Jepson
This well-written, attractive, affordably priced, but bulky guidebook is jammed with photos, maps, historical sidebars, lively quotations, and practical travel advice. It includes short chapters on Padova, Verona, and Vicenza.

Eyewitness Guide: Venice and the Veneto
Susie Boulton and Christopher Catling
Dorling Kindersley's visually sumptuous guide makes a slight sacrifice of depth to breadth by including chapters on the Veneto Plain, Verona, and the Dolomites.

Frommer's Walking Tours: Venice
Robert Ullian and Thomas Worthen
This compact, highly readable guide divides Venice and two islands into 10 pedestrian routes with clear directions, maps, and places to stop for snacks or meals.

Insight Guide: Venice
Insight Guides: Venice book cover Eva Ambros (Editor)
Superb photos, great art direction, and readable prose are a winning combination, especially if you're looking for a gift or souvenir book.

Knopf City Guide: Venice
Anthony Roberts (Translator)
The most comprehensive and elegant guide to Venice, with hundreds of photographs and illustrations to augment the highly readable text. The emphasis is on history, architecture, and art, but you'll also find practical advice and maps.

Michelin Green Guide: Venice
Michelin crams an astonishing quantity of information into its tall and narrow Green Guides, which fit perfectly into a purse or camera bag. The Venice guide's maps, building plans, and descriptions are up to the usual high Michelin standard, and the alphabetical organization is convenient.

The Rough Guide: Venice and the Veneto
Rough Guides: Venice book cover Jonathan Buckley and Hilary Robinson
Black-and-white printing on uncoated paper make this guidebook an ugly duckling next to its competitors. But the price is right, and the book is packed with detailed travel advice for Venice and the Veneto region.

Venice
Touring Club of Italy
Excellent maps, a compact format, and a reasonable price make this book handy for the tourist who doesn't have a lot of time or money to spend in Venice. It's organized as a series of walking tours, with descriptions of sights and landmarks along the way.

Venice in Context
Robert S. Wayne
This self-guided tour of Venice's leading churches, monuments, and squares includes a 158-page guidebook and a dozen narrated tours on audio CDs.
See our review.

Venice for Pleasure
Venice fo Pleasure book cover J.G. Links
Walking tours are the focus of this British guidebook, which was first published in 1966 and is now in its sixth edition. The book, which is sprinkled with lively anecdotes, is geared toward educated readers who have a taste for history, art, and literature.

Venice book recommendations:

Background reading

General-interest guidebooks

Special-interest guidebooks

Popular fiction

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Hotel Advice:

Location can be important in a car-free city with 400+ bridges, especially when you're walking with luggage. Before you book, see:

Hotel Recomendations by Area
Find hotels that are handy to the airport, railroad station, cruise port, or Piazza San Marco, and in Mestre.

Aerial Venice Hotels
Read our tips on choosing the right sestiere or district. Then view individual hotels and their surroundings in large satellite photos and aerial close-ups.

MSC cruise ship in Venice

Venice for Cruisers:

Venice canal reflections

From our Venice Travel Blog:

A water taxi ride to Venice Airport
A warning about water taxis
Venice Railroad Station: a vaporetto view
Long lines at Venice Airport
Free boat trips to Murano
Need to pee? Prepare to pay
Crime in Venice
The perils of overpacking
Venetian daily life

Maggie in Venice

From Maggie in Venice:

A dog's life in Venice
A Beagle boards a water bus
Maggie in Venice video clips