48 Hours in Venice, Italy

I heard you only need a day or two to see Venice. You’ll get tired of all the tourists and it’s so small that you can finish all the sight-seeing in one day. We took that advice and had two full days in Venice. It ended with me feeling like I didn’t want to leave and that it was so much more than I was expecting.

First off, yes, it is touristy. But go to any big city in Europe and you’re bound to get trampled by tour groups holding selfie sticks. However, I feel like in Venice it’s easy to avoid the major touristy hot-spots and still explore its culture and true beauty.

We stayed on the island of Giudecca, across from the “mainland” of Venice. The best part about staying there was that there was NO-ONE! It wasn’t a too populated area and it felt nice and relaxing to be staying somewhere where it didn’t feel like I was overwhelmed by tourists. We stayed at this super cool hostel, Generator Hostel, that was full of other young backpackers and the chef in their restaurant even made us a special vegan meal. Also, if you walk all the way down to the furthest west side of the island, you’ll find the Hilton hotel that has a rooftop bar and pool with an incredible view of Venice. I’m not saying you should sneak in but…

Sunset from the rooftop of the Hilton

We got a paper map and marked a few of the places we for sure wanted to see while getting lost in the canals: two vegan places and one bookstore, of course while stopping at the main sights-to-see along the way.

First up: Gelato

I read online somewhere that there was a traditional gelataria in Venice that served vegan options with vegan cones so of course that was our first mission. We honestly stumbled upon SuSo while looking for the vegan pizza place we had on our list, but why not have dessert before lunch?! This wasn’t your standard “sorbet” that is usually the only vegan option of gelato, but we actually got choices other than plain fruit flavors! We ended up getting a chocolate raspberry flavor (lol fruit flavor but DIFFERENT BECAUSE CHOCOLATE) and strawberry creme flavor (again…the creme…NOT sorbet). I felt like our mission to find gelato in Italy was complete…but that was definitely not the last!

Next: Vegan Pizza

What’s a trip to Italy without gelato AND pizza? Again, we were not disappointed with the standard vegan option of a veggie pizza minus the cheese. Instead we got 5 different vegan pizza options all including vegan cheese! Pizzeria L’angelo sold us on 4 out of the 5 options where we got two pizzas, half and half. Go check them out and peep the Vegan Travel sticker in their window (hehehe).

Yes, we wanted to go to a bookstore in Venice…

A bookstore is not the first thing that pops into your head when planning your day in Venice, is it? Well this isn’t just any ordinary bookstore, but it’s a bookstore with THOUSANDS (really…probably over 100,000) books filling the store, the outside of the store, and in boats and tubs….yes you heard me correctly. They store a lot of the books in boats and tubs to protect them from damage due to the rising waters in Venice. Around back they also have a book staircase that leads you up to a viewpoint of the canals. It’s a really cool experience and outside of where the average tourists might be, so go get lost in this chill part of Venice and visit Alta Aqua Libreria.

Murano and Burano

Day two we left the mainland of Venice and went out to explore some of the other islands. We started in Murano which was a quaint little island with a lot of glass-blown art. We stopped by and watched the glass-blowing process in a warehouse which was a really cool experience, I never really knew how it was done. Then we went to Burano which was my favorite. We grabbed some fruit from a market on the way and spent the rest of the day staring at the beautiful colorful buildings while snacking on dates and peaches. I couldn’t look away. So many colors and so much beauty on Burano.