Two days are enough for Venice, but it does not work the way it does in other cities.
What really decides the order of the days, in a city where everything is a half-hour walk away? Elsewhere the itinerary is set by distances: line up the nearest stops and save time. Here the distances are all short, and what fixes the order of the days is something else: the bookings. Since July 2025 you can only enter St Mark’s Basilica on a time slot bought online, and if you miss your slot you do not get in. And if you want to add Padua, the Scrovegni Chapel does not sell same-day tickets.
This itinerary is therefore built backwards: first the things to lock in, then everything else around them.
Before you leave: the two things to book
There are two, and both are done from home.
St Mark’s Basilica, where the ticket is in your name, the time slot is compulsory and the ticket window no longer exists. Choose mid-morning on the first day, which is when the light on the mosaics is best, and put it in the diary first: everything else revolves around it.
The Scrovegni Chapel, if you are adding Padua: twenty-five people per slot, no tickets on the day, and latecomers have to buy again.
The Doge’s Palace does not require a compulsory booking, but it is the only stop of the two days with a real queue: buying online more than thirty days ahead saves you five euros. Do note, though, that the museum warns that tickets without a time slot only allow entry from 12:00. Everything else, the Accademia and the Frari included, can be bought at the ticket desk without trouble.
Day 1, morning: St Mark’s
Start at Piazza San Marco and join the line for the basilica at your slot.
You do not have long inside, so decide in advance where to look: the narthex with the Genesis dome, which almost everyone crosses at speed, the golden mosaics of the domes, and the floor, a carpet of twelfth-century marble that has been undulating for centuries because the ground beneath has settled. In a church where everyone looks up, it is the thing nobody sees.
If you also take the Museum and the Loggia dei Cavalli, you step out onto the terrace and find the square below you: it is the finest view of Venice you can get without queueing for the campanile. And inside are the four original bronze horses, carried off from Constantinople in 1204 and later by Napoleon. The ones on the front are copies.
How long you need: an hour and a half with the museum, forty minutes without.
Day 1, afternoon: the Doge’s Palace and the basin
Twenty metres away is the Doge’s Palace, and you walk straight there because the two buildings were a single organism: the basilica was the doge’s private chapel.
The ticket is not for the palace alone: it covers four museums, that is the Correr, the Archaeological Museum and the Marciana’s Monumental Rooms, all on the square. Inside, look for Tintoretto’s Paradise in the Chamber of the Great Council, Veronese’s ceilings still in place, and in the frieze of doges’ portraits the black cloth covering the place of Marin Falier, beheaded in 1355.
Then cross the Bridge of Sighs from the inside and go down into the prisons, where the graffiti on the walls are still there.
Do you want to understand the palace in thirty seconds rather than two hours? On the way out, do not take the vaporetto at once: walk along the waterfront towards the Giardini for ten minutes and turn round. From the water the palace shows what it is, an extremely heavy wall resting on two rows of slender columns, built the wrong way round.
How long you need: two hours for the palace, three if you really stop in front of the ceilings.
Day 1, evening: the Correr, if it rains
The Correr is across the square, it is already in your ticket and it is almost always empty. It has Canova’s neoclassical rooms and it is the right refuge when Piazza San Marco becomes impassable or the weather turns.
From 1 May to 26 September, on Fridays and Saturdays, the Doge’s Palace and the Correr stay open until 23:00: if you are here on those days, it is the best window of the year, because the daytime crowd has already dissolved.
Day 2, morning: Dorsoduro and the Accademia
The second day takes you across the canal. Cross the Accademia bridge (the view that opens this article is taken from there) and arrive at the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
It is the place where Venetian painting becomes intelligible, because it is five centuries in a row in one building: Giorgione’s Tempest, Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi with the story of the Inquisition trial, Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave, Carpaccio, and a Bosch nobody expects to find in Venice.
Two things to know first: Mondays are normally closed, though the calendar may include extraordinary openings; and the Vitruvian Man is not on display, because it is a very fragile drawing that the museum keeps away from the light.
How long you need: two hours.
Day 2, afternoon: the Frari and San Rocco
From there, ten minutes on foot inland, and you are at the basilica of the Frari.
Go in and walk straight ahead without looking at anything for ten metres, then stop: at the end, framed by the arch of the choir, is Titian’s Assunta, still in the exact place it was painted for in 1518. It is one of very few chances in Italy to see a sixteenth-century masterpiece where it belongs rather than on a museum wall.
There are also the Pesaro Altarpiece, the Canova monument (a pyramid Canova had designed for Titian’s tomb and which his pupils built for him) and a wooden St John the Baptist by Donatello.
Two hundred metres away is the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, with Tintoretto’s cycle covering the walls and ceilings of two whole halls. If you liked Tintoretto at the Doge’s Palace, that is his largest work, and it is the right way to close the two days.
How long you need: an hour at the Frari, a good hour at San Rocco.
If you have one more day: Padua
The train from Venezia Santa Lucia to Padua takes less than half an hour, and the Scrovegni Chapel is twenty minutes on foot from the station.
It is the most important cycle of frescoes in fourteenth-century Europe, and the visit lasts a counted half hour: fifteen minutes in a compensation chamber, which stabilises the microclimate, and fifteen inside. It is worth the journey, provided you have the booking in hand before you board.
Getting around: the vaporetto, and when you do not need it
Do you really need a vaporetto pass? Venice is best explored on foot: the distances in this itinerary are all under twenty minutes on foot and the vaporetto is mostly for arriving, leaving and reaching the islands.
The ordinary 75-minute ticket costs 9.50 euros on the integrated network, navigation included. If you expect more than two rides a day a timed pass is worth it: as of 1 September 2026 the ACTV fares are 25 euros for 24 hours, 35 for 48 and 45 for 72. Check them again on muoversi.venezia.it before buying.
For two days on this itinerary, two single tickets are almost always enough.
The access contribution: how things stand
This needs a dated fact, because it is the question everyone asks and the answer changes every year.
In 2026 the access contribution applied on 60 days between 3 April and 26 July, from 8:30 to 16:00, and cost 5 euros if booked by the fourth day before and 10 euros in the last four days. The 2026 season is therefore closed, and as of 1 September 2026 the 2027 calendar has not yet been approved: the regulation leaves it to the city government to approve it year by year.
In practice: if you travel in autumn or winter it does not concern you, and if you are planning for spring, check cda.ve.it before you go. Those staying overnight in the city are exempt, but still have to register.
The mistakes I see most often
Putting the Accademia on a Monday. The museum is normally closed, and Monday is also the day many people arrive.
Buying a 72-hour vaporetto pass for two days on foot. With this itinerary you will not get your money back.
Turning up at St Mark’s without a slot. It is no longer a long queue, it is a no.
Giving half a day to Murano and Burano when you only have two. They are lovely and they are far: the boat eats two hours there and back, and takes them from everything else. With two days, leave them out.
Looking for the bronze horses on the front of St Mark’s. Those are copies: the originals are inside, in the museum, reached with the ticket that includes the Loggia.
Photo credit: the Grand Canal towards the Salute and the Dogana from the Accademia bridge, photograph by Wolfgang Moroder (CC BY-SA 3.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
