Venice

Venice is a city in Italy.

It is built on lots of little islands in shallow water. The streets are canals, filled with boats. People walk everywhere, over hundreds of little bridges.

Venice is a city in northern Italy, at the top of the Adriatic Sea. Its old center is spread over 118 small islands in a shallow, crescent-shaped lagoon, joined together by canals and about 400 bridges. Cars cannot drive there, so people walk or ride boats.

The whole city area, called the comune, also includes towns on the mainland, such as Mestre. About 249,000 people lived in the comune in 2025, but by the early 2000s fewer than one in four of them lived in the old island city.

Venice, capital of the Veneto region, lies on an archipelago in the Laguna Veneta, a crescent-shaped lagoon about 51 km long at the northwestern end of the Adriatic. UNESCO describes the historic city as spread over 118 small islands; Britannica counts more than 200 original canals and about 400 bridges.

The administrative comune reaches around the lagoon's 145 km perimeter, taking in the mainland districts of Mestre and Marghera and the Marco Polo airport. Italy's statistics office, ISTAT, counted 249,490 residents in the comune in 2025. The historic center's share has fallen steadily: about three-fourths at the start of the 20th century, more than half at mid-century, and less than one-fourth by the early 21st century.

Venice has a giant square called St. Mark's Square.

At one end is a church with round domes and shiny gold pictures. A tall brick bell tower stands nearby. The biggest canal curves through the city like a long letter S.

St. Mark's Square is a huge paved square lined with arches. At one end stands St. Mark's Basilica, finished in 1071, with five arched doorways, five domes and shining mosaics above its arches. Next to it rises the Campanile, a 99-meter brick bell tower.

The Grand Canal, Venice's main waterway, curves through the city in a giant backward S for more than 3 kilometers. Palaces built by rich merchant families line its banks. Only four bridges cross it; the most famous is the Rialto Bridge, from about 1590.

The Piazza San Marco, a vast paved and arcaded square, opens before the five portals of St. Mark's Basilica. The first church on the site was begun in 829; the present basilica, distinctly Byzantine in design and topped by five domes, was completed in 1071, and over the centuries sculpture, mosaics and treasures were added. The 99 m Campanile collapsed in 1902 and was rebuilt around a reinforced-concrete core by 1912.

The Grand Canal describes a backward S more than two miles (3 km) long, from the railway station to the basin before the Doges' Palace, 30 to 70 m wide and lined with merchants' palaces and warehouses. Four bridges span it: the Rialto Bridge by Antonio da Ponte (about 1590), the Accademia (1930s), the marble Scalzi Bridge (1932) and Santiago Calatrava's Constitution Bridge (2008). The Teatro La Fenice is an opera house.

In Venice, people walk or ride boats.

Water buses carry people along the canals. Long black boats called gondolas glide by. Even the garbage and the ambulance travel by boat!

Venice is a walking city. Cars are banned except in two big parking areas, so people go everywhere on foot, along canal banks and over about 400 bridges.

On the water, public water buses called vaporetti work like city buses, and water taxis zip about. Special boats carry fruit and vegetables, garbage, luggage, police and even ambulances. Only several hundred gondolas, long black boats rowed by a gondolier, are left, and a few still ferry people across the Grand Canal. A railway causeway, built in 1846, links the islands to the mainland.

Britannica calls Venice a walking city: apart from the large parking areas at Piazzale Roma and on the Lido, automobiles are banned, and any point can be reached on foot along canal banks, paved streets, squares and some 400 bridges, many of them 19th-century wrought-iron replacements for arched marble ones.

The waterways carry everything else: vaporetti run by the municipal transport company, private motor-launch taxis, and barges for fruit and vegetables, garbage and tourists' baggage, alongside ambulance and police launches. Only several hundred keelless gondolas remain, a few serving as Grand Canal ferries. The 1846 railway causeway, nearly 3 km long on 222 arches, ended the city's isolation from the mainland, and the Constitution Bridge (2008) now links the station to Piazzale Roma.

Each neighborhood in Venice has a little square, called a campo, with a church.

On the island of Murano, people make beautiful glass. Many people in Venice work welcoming visitors from all over the world.

In Venice, each neighborhood grew around a small square called a campo, with its well and its church, and many are still distinct communities. Houses are usually three or four stories tall, with red brick or ochre-painted walls.

Since 1291, much of Venice's glassmaking has happened on the nearby island of Murano. Today most people in the city work in tourism, because millions of visitors come every year. That brings money, but also crowds and high prices, and a shrinking share of the city's people live in the old island city.

The historic city keeps its old parish structure: Britannica describes neighborhoods centered on a campo, the site of the community well, and its church, still distinct communities in many ways. The Ghetto, in the northwest, where Venice's Jews were confined from 1516 to 1797, gave the world the word ghetto. Ordinary houses rise three or four stories; palaces front the larger canals.

Tourism has been at the heart of the economy since the end of the 18th century, and most of the city's workers are employed in it and related industries. Britannica notes that millions of visitors a year strain the infrastructure and push up prices, and that a shrinking share of the comune's people live in the historic center. Glassmaking furnaces moved to Murano in 1291 as a fire precaution, and Murano remains the center of Venetian glass. Venice and its Lagoon has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.