The 6 best towns that eat well within an hour of Venice

1. Abano Terme

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

44 min from Venice · homes €1,250 to €1,700 a m² in the center · 20,464 people

Why visit Abano Terme

Abano Terme sits at 14 meters on the eastern slope of the Euganean Hills, ten kilometers southwest of Padova. The springs surface at 80°C, classified as hyperthermal bromo-iodine-salt water, and the Veneti were already worshipping them in the eighth century BC.

The Romans built a temple to Aponus here and called the place Aquae Patavinae. The Lombards destroyed the baths in the sixth century.

They were rebuilt when Abano became an autonomous comune in the twelfth, enlarged again in the late fourteenth, and absorbed into the Republic of Venice from 1405 to 1797. The Colle Montirone archaeological site still holds traces of the Roman thermal complex, and the Duomo di San Lorenzo, rebuilt in 1780 over an older church, anchors the historic center.

The contemporary draw is fango-balneotherapy: mineral mud aged for sixty days in the source basins, then applied at body temperature. Most of the 250 hotels in Abano-Montegrotto are spa hotels.

Aubergine is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Abano Terme

• Duomo di San Lorenzo. Cathedral rebuilt in 1780 over a pre-existing church, with a campanile dating to the fourteenth century and a Baroque interior.
• Colle Montirone. Archaeological site on a small thermal hill, with traces of the Roman baths of Aponus and an obelisk erected in the eighteenth century.
• Parco Termale Urbano. Public thermal park threading the centro storico, with footpaths between hotels, gardens and the source pools.

How to get to Abano Terme

It has its own railway station. Venice is about 44 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Abano Terme

2. Vittorio Veneto

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

59 min from Venice · homes €1,100 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 27,259 people

Why visit Vittorio Veneto

Vittorio Veneto sits at 138 meters at the foot of the Cansiglio plateau, seventy-five kilometers north of Padova. The commune was formed in 1866 by merging Ceneda, on the plain, with Serravalle, in the narrow valley above, and named for King Vittorio Emanuele II.

The two centers kept their own identities rather than blending into one. Serravalle is the older, walled district, set higher in the valley, with its cathedral holding the altarpiece of the Virgin with two saints.

Ceneda lies lower down on the plain, holding the Loggia of the Comunità and an eighteenth-century cathedral of its own alongside the castle ruins on the hill above it. In July 1923 the town took the name it carries now, after the battle that had taken its name from it five years earlier: the offensive of 24 October 1918 broke the Austro-Hungarian line, and the Armistice of Villa Giusti, effective 4 November, closed the war on this front.

The renaming fixed a wartime event permanently onto a place that had, until then, been two separate medieval settlements sharing a valley. What stands today is that same double structure, upper town and lower town, walled district and plain, still legible as two places joined by one name.

Le Macine is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Vittorio Veneto

• Duomo di Serravalle. Rebuilt cathedral in the upper walled centro storico, holding the altarpiece of the Virgin with Saints Peter and Andrew in continuous liturgical use since it was painted.
• Museo della Battaglia. In the Loggia of the Comunità di Ceneda, built 1534-1538, with relics and documents of the offensive that ended the war on this front.
• Serravalle. Northern walled district above Ceneda, with sixteenth-century arcaded houses along the Meschio and the 1462 Loggia Serravallese.

How to get to Vittorio Veneto

It has its own railway station. Venice is about 59 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Vittorio Veneto

3. Treviso

Best for a day out from Venice. It is 39 min by car.

39 min from Venice · homes €2,100 to €3,700 a m² in the center · 85,652 people

Why visit Treviso

Treviso sits at 15 meters where the Botteniga flows into the Sile, twenty-five kilometers inland from Venice. The Roman Tarvisium took its name from a Celtic root for bull, and the city became a municipium after 89 BC.

After the Caminesi and a brief Scaliger domination, Treviso submitted to the Republic of Venice on 29 June 1339, the first major mainland territory of the Serenissima. The walls and ramparts that still ring the centro storico were built then and renewed in the next century under Fra Giocondo.

The Botteniga splits into a network of canals locals call the cagnan; the Sile runs the southern flank of the walls and feeds the Pescheria, the fish market on its own island. The Palazzo dei Trecento on Piazza dei Signori, the Loggia dei Cavalieri, the Duomo with the Annunciazione of Titian and the frescoed cloister of San Nicolò give the city its medieval and Renaissance spine.

Tiramisu was invented at the Alle Beccherie restaurant near the duomo in the 1970s.

Il Basilisco (MICHELIN), Le Beccherie (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Feria (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 8 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Treviso

• Piazza dei Signori. Civic heart of Treviso, with the thirteenth-century Palazzo dei Trecento, the Torre Civica and the arcades that frame the medieval public space.
• Duomo di San Pietro. Cathedral founded in the twelfth century and rebuilt in the eighteenth, with the Annunciazione by Titian in the Malchiostro chapel.
• Chiesa di San Nicolò. Gothic Dominican church with frescoes by Tomaso da Modena, including the 1352 chapter house portraits of forty Dominican brothers.

How to get to Treviso

It has its own railway station. Venice is about 39 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Treviso

4. Chioggia

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

46 min from Venice · homes €1,250 to €2,050 a m² in the center · 47,265 people

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Why visit Chioggia

Chioggia sits at 2 meters on a small island at the southern entrance to the Venetian Lagoon, twenty-five kilometers south of Venice and connected to the mainland and to its frazione Sottomarina by causeways. The Romans knew it as Clodia.

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries it had grown into a salt-producing port and became a free commune in 1110. The naval war that carries the town's name ran through 1378-81 and ended Genoese rivalry with Venice, leaving Chioggia under the Serenissima for the next four centuries.

The defeat reduced the town to fishing, salt and limited Adriatic trade. The fleet never left.

The street plan is a herringbone of calli running off the town's single straight spine, with three canals threading between them and the bridges that gave the town its Little Venice nickname. Inland lies the historic island itself; across the causeway sits Sottomarina, the beach frazione facing the open Adriatic where the lagoon town has none.

What Chioggia lost at sea it kept at the dock: a working port still built around the same trade that outlasted the war which was supposed to end it.

El Gato is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Chioggia

• Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Cathedral founded in the eleventh century, raised to episcopal seat in 1110, rebuilt from 1623 to designs by Baldassare Longhena.
• Canale Vena. Main canal of the centro storico, lined with fishing boats and crossed by nine bridges including the seventeenth-century Ponte Vigo.
• Mercato del Pesce. Wholesale fish market on the canal, open before dawn six days a week, the operating center of the Adriatic fleet.

How to get to Chioggia

It has its own railway station. Venice is about 46 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Chioggia

5. Vicenza

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

52 min from Venice · homes €1,400 to €2,050 a m² in the center · 110,468 people

Why visit Vicenza

Vicenza is the city that made Palladio and that Palladio made. Andrea della Gondola, better known as Palladio, was a stonemason's apprentice in Vicenza in the 1520s, was renamed by his patron Trissino after the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, and spent the next 50 years building villas, palazzi and churches for the local Venetian-territory aristocracy.

The result: a 16th-century city of unprecedented architectural coherence, UNESCO-inscribed in 1994 as 'The City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto'. The greatest hits cluster inside the walls: the Basilica Palladiana on Piazza dei Signori (his first major commission, 1549; a Gothic medieval town hall wrapped in a white loggia of perfectly proportioned arches), Palazzo Chiericati (now the Pinacoteca), Loggia del Capitaniato, Palazzo Thiene, and the Teatro Olimpico, his final building (1580–1585), the world's oldest surviving indoor theater, with a permanent trompe-l'œil stage set by Scamozzi depicting 'the seven streets of Thebes' in forced perspective.

A 20-minute walk south of the centro: Villa La Rotonda (1567), the symmetrical perfect-square villa that every American state capitol and Monticello copied. Vicenza also has Venice's gold and silver: half the gold sold in Italy passes through here annually (it's Europe's largest gold-jewellery district), and Vicenzaoro is the world's biggest gold trade fair.

Plus the Veneto kitchen: baccalà alla vicentina (salt cod with milk, anchovies and onions, served over polenta), bigoli with duck ragù, the local Lessini Durello sparkling wine, and Vicenza's own asparago bianco DOP in May.

Osteria Bertoliana (Slow Food), Matteo Grandi in Basilica (L'Espresso and Gambero Rosso), FuoriModena - Cucina km 200 (Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in Vicenza

• Basilica Palladiana + Piazza dei Signori. Palladio's 1549 wrap of perfect-proportioned white arches around the medieval Palazzo della Ragione: his first major commission, the building that made his name. The rooftop terrace is open and free.
• Teatro Olimpico. Palladio's final work (1580–85) and the world's oldest surviving indoor theater. Scamozzi's permanent stage set shows 'the seven streets of Thebes' in trompe-l'œil forced perspective. They still perform here.
• Villa Capra 'La Rotonda'. The perfectly symmetrical 1567 villa on a hilltop 2 km south: a square plan with four identical pedimented porticoes, copied by Jefferson at Monticello and every state capitol in America.

How to get to Vicenza

It has its own railway station. Venice is about 52 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Vicenza

6. Padova

Best for a day out from Venice. It is 34 min by car.

34 min from Venice · homes €2,250 to €3,400 a m² in the center · 207,412 people

Why visit Padova

The Università degli Studi di Padova was founded in 1222 by scholars who had left Bologna in search of academic freedom, and for half a millennium it supplied the Veneto with its doctors and lawyers. Galileo lectured on physics here between 1592 and 1610.

Copernicus studied here. Elena Cornaro Piscopia became, in 1678, the first woman anywhere to receive a university doctorate.

The teaching happened in the same rooms tourists now walk through, which is part of what makes the university feel less like a monument and more like a machine that has never stopped running. The city's older story predates the university by centuries in spirit if not in stone: in 1303 Enrico Scrovegni commissioned a fresco cycle for his family chapel, an act of atonement for his father's usury, and the result changed what painting could do.

Separately, and for entirely different reasons, the city's botanical garden preserves a walled circular plan laid down in the sixteenth century, the layout that made it the template for every university garden that followed. Away from these two, the Basilica di Sant'Antonio draws pilgrims to a reliquary and a bronze outside its doors, the Palazzo della Ragione holds an astrological fresco hall and a two-hundred-year-old wooden horse, and a historic caffè has served coffee since 1831 in a neoclassical room that once served as Risorgimento headquarters.

The kitchen runs to bigoli with duck ragù, baccalà mantecato, risi e bisi in spring, and white asparagus from the Piazza delle Erbe market in May. What holds the city together is the university's habit of making its past into working infrastructure: a lecture hall still gives lectures, a dissection theater still stands where it was built, a garden still grows on its original beds.

Caffè Pedrocchi (Locali Storici), Stefano Mocellin al Padovanino (MICHELIN), Belle Parti (MICHELIN) and 9 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Padova

• Cappella degli Scrovegni (Giotto, 1303–1305). 38 scenes from the life of Christ and Mary, painted directly onto the plaster of a single chapel. The air-handling required to keep the pigment stable is why entry is capped at 15 minutes and 25 people at a time.
• Orto Botanico (1545, UNESCO). A walled circular garden, laid out on its founding plan and unchanged in shape since. Goethe stood among its beds. A modern biodiversity greenhouse has been added alongside the historic plot.
• Prato della Valle. An elliptical canal ringed by 78 statues of Padovan worthies, enclosing a central island and facing the Basilica of Santa Giustina. At 88,000 square meters it is the largest piazza in Italy.

How to get to Padova

It has its own railway station. Venice is about 34 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Padova