ABOVE: The LaGare Hotel Venezia (right) is directly across from the Murano Museo boat platform, which offers direct waterbus connections to Marco Polo Airport, Venice's historic center, and the Marittima cruise terminals. Murano is famous for its glass factories and shops, but the car-free island (which lies just off Venice in the Venetian Lagoon) has other attractions, too--including historic churches, a superb Glass Museum, and plenty of restaurants with canalside tables. Until recently, Murano had only a handful of tiny hotels, but now there's a brand-new hostelry in town: the four-star LaGare Hotel Venezia, which belongs to the Accor hotel... Continue reading

This morning, Cheryl spied a tourist (apparently German, since he was wearing a Jack Wolfskin parka) pushing a stroller through the streets of Venice with two West Highland White Terriers as passengers. Cheryl immediately jumped into puppyrazzi mode and shot three photos of the cute canine cargo: Continue reading

ABOVE: A rainy day in Venice, Italy. If you've every found yourself slipping and sliding on wet cobblestones, you'll appreciate one of Venice's least-heralded but most pedestrian-friendly urban features: the use of flat, lightly-textured paving stones that offer good traction underfoot on rainy days. The same stone is used on many of Venice's 400+ bridges. As a bonus, the city marks the edges of stone steps and canalside pavements with highly-visible strips of white Istrian stone, making it less likely that you'll miss a step or stride inadvertently into a canal. We don't know who came up with Venice's paving... Continue reading

ABOVE: Actors will portray WWII Britons during "An Evening on the Home Front" at Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire. Blists Hill Victorian Town, one of Shropshire's ten Ironbridge Gorge Museums, is celebrating its 40th anniversary with "Blitz Hill: An Evening on the Home Front" on Saturday, June 22, from 6 to 9 p.m. When you arrive, you'll be given a ration coupon for an ounce of kali. (Think of the kali as an appetizer: Fish & chips and beer will be on sale in unlimited quantities throughout the evening.) The museum's organizers note that "on this midsummer evening, no... Continue reading

ABOVE: This nine-minute video offers a great overview of the Venetian Lagoon, the Lido di Venezia, and the islands that surround Venice's historic center. If you've seen our satellite-image orientation map at Veniceforvisitors.com, you know that Venice is a cluster of islands in the Venetian Lagoon, which is separated from the Adriatic Sea by the Lido di Venezia (a long, narrow resort island). And if you've flown into Venice's Marco Polo Airport, you may have enjoyed a real-time overview of Venice and its Lagoon from the air. For an even better birds'-eye view of Venice, you can book a private... Continue reading

ABOVE: The Hotel Excelsior faces the Adriatic Sea, with its own private beach. In the background, you can see the Venetian Lagoon and Venice's historic center. The Hotel Excelsior on the Lido di Venezia, Venice's resort island, has been renovated for the 2013 season. The five-star luxury hotel reopened on April 10 after its winter hiatus with new carpeting, restored tapestries, replacement of bathtubs with large showers, new plasma TVs, and free Wi-Fi throughout the hotel premises (including the Excelsior's private beach). The Moorish-style Hotel Excelsior has attracted well-heeled resort guests to the Lido since July 21, 1908, when some... Continue reading

ABOVE: A "Starbucks on Rails" car in Zürich's Hauptbahnhof. INSET BELOW: A Starbucks barista strikes a pose during a press preview. The next time you feel a craving for caffeine as you're traveling across Switzerland, you may be able to get a Starbucks fix without leaping off the train. According to the Swiss Travel System, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FSS), will launch a "Starbucks on Rails" car as a pilot project on the Geneva-St. Gallen-Geneva route in fall, 2013. A Second Starbucks on Rails will be added to the same route in spring, 2014. The test phase will... Continue reading

The city of Venice and software developer Diego Pizzocaro have announced a free smartphone app titled "hi!tide Venice." The app is available in English for both iOS (iPhone) and Android, and it predicts acqua alta (tidal flooding) with data supplied by Venice's official tidal-monitoring and flood-warning service, the Istituzione Centro Previsioni e Segnalazioni Maree. The app's main screen shows the current tide plus anticipated low and high tides over the next two days. You can click on a daily forecast for a more detailed view that includes an hour-by-hour graph. You'll also see icons for "Places" and "Ferries" that show... Continue reading

ABOVE: "Where can I picnic in Venice?" is one of the questions that we answer in our new FAQ at Veniceforvisitors.com. We've just published a Venice Travel FAQ at our main site, Venice for Visitors (a.k.a. Veniceforvisitors.com). The 10 pages of Q&A cover the following topics: General questions about Venice Planning a trip Hotels and vacation apartments Arriving and getting around Money and credit cards Food and drink Sightseeing and tours Shopping Personal safety and emergencies Cruises Many of the answers link to more detailed information on our site, or (where appropriate) to other resources such as the Port of... Continue reading

ABOVE: A mohair plush teddy bear made by Chad Valley Company Ltd. around 1955. © Victoria and Albert Museum. Do stuffed animals make you feel warm and fuzzy? Head for the Portsmouth City Museum in Portsmouth, England to see an exhibition of nearly 150 teddy bears from the V&A Museum of Childhood in London. The show will run from March 16 through September 15, 2013. The exhibition showcases teddy bears of all shapes and sizes, along with teddies from picture books, movies, and TV shows. It traces the history of the teddy bear from the first designs (which were based... Continue reading

On our travel-planning site, Venice for Visitors, we've just launched a preview version of a new section: Venice Hotel Directions. The pages have step-by-step walking directions to individual hotels from nearby transportation points, such as Alilaguna airport-boat stops, the Santa Lucia Railroad Station, or airport buses and taxis at the Piazzale Roma. Each page has a customized Google satellite map of the area around the hotel, with icons for the featured hotel and others in the neighborhood that can serve as landmarks. We've also included links to Venere hotel pages (featuring TripAdvisor reviews), Booking.com hotel pages, and the hotels' own... Continue reading

by Durant Imboden While browsing on Facebook, I ran across a YouTube link to a wedding video titled The Italian Job // Love in Venice. The video, which is mostly set in Venice with a side trip to Milan, features a Malaysian bride and groom who were in Italy for their wedding photos and (possibly) a destination wedding. The nearly eight-minute production by GregsVideo begins with a train scene that obviously was inspired by the meeting between Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in a silly but visually appealing thriller, The Tourist, that was released in 2010. Below is the Venetian-themed... Continue reading

We seldom publicize tours, since our site focuses on independent travel, but every now and then we learn about an itinerary that's interesting enough (or amusing enough) to be worth featuring. In this post, we'll introduce you to Operation: Euro213, The Istanbul Venetian Affair, which Theme Park People have organized in cooperation with Globus Tours. The 10-day tour begins in Istanbul on June 29, and it wraps on July 8 after a two-night stay in Venice. Along the way, participants will visit six cities in five countries, including locations from such films as Skyfall, From Russia With Love, The Bourne... Continue reading

ABOVE: The Ponte di Calatrava is higher than most of Venice's bridges, but it has shallow steps and a gentle incline, so it's more manageable with luggage than you might guess. We often get e-mails from readers who are worried about struggling over Venice's footbridges with luggage and other gear. Their concern isn't unwarranted: Venice is a city with more than 400 bridges--nearly all with steps--and few of those bridges are equipped with ramps for wheeled suitcases, strollers, or wheelchairs. To make life easier for readers who'd like to minimize the up-and-down aspect of reaching their hotels, we've added a... Continue reading

Bern Tourismus is promoting a "Fondue Carriage Ride" this winter. For a mere 190 Swiss francs, a couple can tour Switzerland's cozy capital in a pedicab or cycle rickshaw (dubbed a "Fonduekscha") while noshing on cheese fondue and white wine. (Singles pay 160 francs, so if you're traveling alone, you might as well save money by hooking up with a fellow fondue fan at your hotel or hostel.) The 60- to 90-minute tours operate from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with late-night departures available on request. The video below, which is narrated in Bernese dialect, shows what to expect... Continue reading

ABOVE: A Meccano model of a Burrell locomotive by Dave Harvey. According to a description at Dalefield.com, the model weighs about 30 lb (13.5 Kb), has two drive speeds and a differential, and took some 500 hours to build. You can see it on February 9 at Enginuity in Shropshire. The Meccano system, known in the USA as "Erector Set," has had a cult following among modelers since Frank Hornby of Liverpool, England invented Meccano in 1901. The system, which remains in production, includes girders, strips, plates, shafts, gears, pulleys, and other items that can be used to assemble anything... Continue reading

Do you plan trips on your smartphone, or do you plan to bring your iPhone, Android phone, or Windows phone with you to Venice? If so, take a look at our new Venice for Visitors mobile section at m.veniceforvisitors.com. We've edited, reformatted, and (in some cases) rewritten more than 200 of our most popular and informative pages for display on smartphones. The pages are designed for easy reading when you're holding your phone vertically. We've even made the menu text larger, with more vertical space between menu items, to make site navigation easier. In addition, we've made our main site... Continue reading

As we've reported in a post on our Europe for Visitors Blog, all of our travel-planning sites under the Europeforvisitors.com umbrella--including Venice for Visitors--have a new look for 2013. We've also made some changes under the hood to make the site faster and more useful to readers on desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. First: We've switched from a three-column layout to a two-column design, with the editorial content on the left side of the page. Most navigation links are now in menus that you can reach via top links with headings such as "Transportation," "Planning," and "Hotels." You'll find... Continue reading

For 2013, we've made a few small but significant changes to Europeforvisitors.com and our related travel-planning sites: First, we've switched from a three-column to a two-column layout, with a top menu replacing the left-hand navigation bar. This will make our pages display better (and without horizontal scrolling) on most smartphones. It also should make our body text easier to read on smaller tablets like the iPad Mini and the Nexus 7. Second, we've removed our photo from the page header, which now displays a simplified logo (see the enlarged sample above). This isn't an earth-shattering change, but it does put... Continue reading

View Larger Map ABOVE: As this Google Map shows, the Crowne Plaza Venice East isn't in Venice. It's miles away on the mainland. Over the last year or so, we've had a number of inquiries about the Crowne Plaza Venice East, a hotel that isn't in Venice at all: It's in Quarto d'Altino, a town on the Venetian mainland about 16 kilometers or 10 miles from Venice as the crow flies. We have nothing against the Crowne Plaza Venice East per se. Its user reviews are mostly favorable, and we're confident that it's a decent place to stay if you... Continue reading

Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is said to be the world's largest model railway, but it's more than that: The vast display also features ships, highways, city downtowns, and a football stadium. Watch the video above to get a preview of the attraction, then head for the historic warehouse district of Hamburg, Germany to experience Miniatur Wunderland at first hand. The exhibition was conceived and created by twin brothers Frederik and Gerrit Braun, who finished the first phase of construction in 2001. The brothers plan to continue expanding Miniature Wunderland until 2020, when it will cover a model area of more... Continue reading

ABOVE: Maggie of Maggieinvenice.com guards the doorway of Harry's Bar in Venice. We have mixed feelings about Harry's Bar (can anyone really justify spending nearly 17 euros for a Bellini?), but there's no denying that the saloon/restaurant has a colorful history and was an institution among the moneyed set before it became a popular tourist attraction. Recently, Wendy Furtado of Nowness.com called our attention to a video interview with Arrigo Cipriani, the proprietor of Harry's Bar, from the luxury lifestyle site's "Five Days of Food" series. (Nowness is an editorially-independent Web site owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the... Continue reading