Two days in Venice
Summary
If you get Venice right, it is a truly magical experience, but the difficulty is trying to make your experience not dominated by the hoardes of fellow tourists. I won’t write a detailed review for Venice because it was some years since I visited, but my biggest 3 tips are:
#1 Get lost and do so in areas without the major attractions – you’ve probably heard this before, but the most enjoyable experience is when you are completely lost in the tiny alleyways and find some square or open area that is super quiet and makes you feel like having Venice to yourself. Zero chance of having that feeling in the famous spots
#2 Avoid summer, weekends and Carnival (usually February) – we visited in the winter and it felt far quieter. Weather didn’t limit anything we wanted to do
#3 Stay overnight – that way you avoid the day trippers and have that great spooky feeling when wandering through the streets in the, hopefully, misty evening
Experiences nearby
The below map shows experiences nearby with a colour that reflect the Overall Score of those experiences
Other Old Town Experiences around the World
Score Detail
Background - how many times have you asked someone what a travel experience was like and the response was "amazing" or "awesome"? That response is nice to know, but it makes it hard to differentiate that experience compared to others. That is exactly what these scores are trying to do - differentiate the experience by giving a score out of 10 based on 6 categories and then giving an overall experience score
This overall experience score is calculated by: take the highest of the "Culture" or "Nature" score (1-10) + "Fun factor" (1-10) + "Avoiding the crowds" (1-10) + highest of the "Unique" or "World Famous score" (1-10). Then convert into a score out of 100
Extra detail - the logic being that I find all of the 6 individual scores important, but I don't want to mark an experience down just because it doesn't cover both "Culture" and "Nature", or because it isn't both "World Famous" and "Unique". Take the examples of Safari in The Serengeti and walking through Rome - they both appeal at opposite ends of the nature / culture spectrum, and you can have a fantastic time without needing to appeal to both sides. So, their overall scores aren't penalized for their lack of one or the other, and I've done the same for "World Famous" vs "Unique". But . . . I do think that the "Fun factor" of an experience is important, irrelevant of other factors, and so is "Avoiding the Crowds" (or where there are crowds that add to the experience). So, both of these scores are standalone