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Venice Books

General-interest guidebooks

The Venice I know
Margie Miklas
Choose between paperback, digital, or audiobook format when buying this guidebook (published in 2021) from Amazon. The book, written by the creator of the "Margie in Italy" blog, combines practical advice with travel narrative.

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
Lisa Gerard-Sharp
Superb photos, great art direction, and readable prose are a winning combination, especially if you're looking for a gift or souvenir book. The author, Lisa Gerard-Sharp, has written another guidebook that features 14 illustrated walking tours: Venice (Step by Step).

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
Jonathan Buckley
Mr. Buckley's book is packed with detailed travel advice for Venice and the Veneto region, and recent editions have been given a visual makeover with color printing. In addition to covering the usual travel topics, this Rough Guide "tells you more about the city as it is today than any other guidebook, with features on everything from flood-prevention projects to the travails of Venice's football team." (E-book and Pocket Rough Guide editions are also available.)

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
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.