Instead of Venezia
Instead of Venezia: coastal towns and island towns within 150 minutes
Venice is not overrated and it is over-visited, which are different problems with the same symptom. Thirty million people a year arrive somewhere with fifty thousand residents left in it.
The lagoon and the coast either side of it hold small towns built on the same water, with the same brick and the same light, and no queue at the vaporetto.
Coastal towns and island towns in our catalogue within 150 minutes of Venezia by road, ranked by outside recognition. Venezia itself and the other famous places are left out. 9 towns match, and all of them are below.
Instead of Venezia
Venezia · 250,369 residents · Veneto
- RavennaRavenna
Coastal town · UNESCO
- From Venezia
- 2h 29m by car
- By train
- Reachable
- Residents
- 155,751
- When to go
- May–Sep
- AquileiaUdine
Coastal town · UNESCO
- From Venezia
- 1h 36m by car
- By train
- Reachable
- Residents
- 3,128
- When to go
- May–Sep
- ComacchioFerrara
Coastal town · Bandiera Blu
- From Venezia
- 2h 6m by car
- Residents
- 22,017
- When to go
- May–Sep
- GradoGorizia
Coastal town · Bandiera Blu
- From Venezia
- 1h 40m by car
- Residents
- 7,658
- When to go
- May–Sep
- ChioggiaVenezia
Coastal town · Bandiera Blu
- From Venezia
- 49m by car
- By train
- Reachable
- Residents
- 47,630
- When to go
- May–Sep
The 5 best-recognised of the 9 towns that match. Drive times measured by road from Venezia. More of them follow below.
Ravenna
Province: Ravenna · 4 m
A 4-meter coastal capital of three successive empires, with eight UNESCO mosaic monuments from the fifth and sixth centuries.
Aquileia
Province: Udine · 5 m
A village of 3,128 on a Roman capital of 100,000, where the largest paleochristian mosaic floor in the West runs under a Romanesque basilica.
Comacchio
Province: Ferrara
A canal town on thirteen islets, with brackish lagoons that hold three hundred bird species.
Grado
Province: Gorizia · 2 m
An Adriatic island town inside a 90-square-kilometer lagoon, refuge of the Aquileian patriarchs after 568 and a Habsburg bathing resort thirteen centuries later.
Chioggia
Province: Venezia · 2 m
Italy's second fishing port, on an island at the south end of the Venetian Lagoon, called Little Venice for its canal.
Rosolina
Province: Rovigo · 3 m
A reclaimed commune where a nine-kilometer beach and a maritime pine forest sit between the Adige mouth and the Adriatic.
Marano Lagunare
Province: Udine · 2 m
A fishing town on its own pastel-coloured harbour, with a working fleet, an Aquileian Venetian past, and a still-strict dialect of its own.
Muggia
Province: Trieste · 13 m
The only town on the Istrian peninsula still inside Italy, a small Venetian port on the Gulf of Trieste five kilometers from the Slovenian border.
Trieste
Province: Trieste · 2 m
The Adriatic port the Habsburgs built as their window on the sea, an Italian regional capital still arguing in four languages on the Slovenian border.
Drive times measured by road from Venezia. A town with no time shown is one the router could not reach, usually because it is served by ferry. How this data is built.