Osteria Bancogiro, Venice

Now here, I'm afraid, is a classic example of style over substance. It's very nice to sit in a first floor brick vaulted dining room near the Rialto market, a babble of tourists drinking and taking cichetti below, the Christmas lights of the souvenir stalls twinkling across the campo. It's nice to gaze on a square white plate of salmon and fennel and pear, or a salad of duck ham, blue cheese and grapes. How about smoked tuna with aubergine and a pumpkin and cardamom sauce, or lamb with tarragon? They read well on the menu, they look good on the plate...if only they tasted of something!

I'm not trying to be unkind or harsh, really I'm not. There are lots of people on Tripadvisor who would say I'm an idiot, that the food here is the best they've ever tasted. (And four who would say I'm being too kind). So I'm prepared to think that we just came on a bad day. Maybe the chef had a cold and had lost his sense of taste. Maybe he had had his tongue cut out with a stiletto in a feud with with a gondolier over a beautiful woman. Well, you never know in Venice.

For whatever reason, he clearly wasn't tasting his food that day, and we paid over 100 euros for two plates each of mediocre dishes, eaten in beautiful but empty dining room. The wine was good though. Listen, don't let me put you off. Dozens of Tripadvisors can't be wrong (surely?), and I can be, easily, and often. But really, everything here was in very good taste; except the food.

Osteria Bancogiro, Campo San Giacometto, San Polo 122, under the porticoes, Venice, 30125

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• Osteria Bancogiro

Ca' Favretto, Venice

A room with a view of the Grand Canal: you'll pay a pretty price. But actually, the cost of our room at Ca' Favretto, which had this view from its window, was quite reasonable and the room was large and comfortable. Maybe it's because we were at the 'tradesman's' end of the canal, amongst the market and the post office rather than the galleries and palazzos and piazzas. But this is a convenient place to be: San Stae or Rialto Mercato vaporetto stops are just steps away, as is the Rialto bridge, and the traghetto across to San Marcuola gets you to Canareggio in minutes – if you master the art of standing up in a gondola.

The water laps and sucks at the hotel's canal frontage, and here is where you'll arrive if you have the taste to come by water taxi. Arrival on foot is a bit less salubrious, and more obscure, but not difficult if you're used to the anonymity of Venice's alleyways.

Breakfast was a good natured bun fight, in a room too small, or at least too narrow, for the number of guests, making for lots of polite giving way as people head for the fruit juice and coffee or return with a plate full of ham and cheese. A pity that, when we were there, it was too raw and cold to open the breakfast room doors out onto a balcony over the canal.


At night the noises from the canal were reassuring rather than disturbing. Vaporetti in the night and delivery barges in the early morning, bringing produce to the market. Not just a view, you see, but an ambient soundtrack too.


Residenza d'Epoca Ca' Favretto, Santa Croce, 2232 30135 - VENEZIA
Tel 041 52 41 768   


Hotel Ca' Favretto

Caffe' Florian, Venice

"How much?!" Our indignant son could never quite understand, or even believe, that we had paid that much for morning coffee. I can't remember now how much 'that much' was. But it was a lot. More than I've ever paid anywhere for three cups of coffee, a hot chocolate and a liqueur. I told him that we were seated in Venice's oldest caffe', that they had been serving coffee here since 1720, that some of the most influential creative minds of Europe had partaken here and discussed great things. We were just another moment in its history, I said. He told me we'd been had.

So it depends, I suppose, on your take on life as to whether you appreciate Caffe' Florian or not. It's beautiful inside, certainly, and the staff is impeccable. But coffee can only get so good, and in truth I couldn't discern that much difference from the pot I'd had at breakfast in the hotel that morning. Our daughter's hot chocolate disappeared as quickly as a Starbucks version, and the liqueur was, well, alcoholic. Call me a philistine, but what's all the fuss about?

Well, for a start, how many branches of Starbucks will still be here in 300 years time? Florian is unique, a piece of Venetian history, and of its culture. The fact that tourism has also turned it into something of a theme park experience is hardly the fault of the caffe'. "We even tried increasing our prices to astronomic heights", they might say, "and still the tourists come!"

So, I've been, and I probably wouldn't go again. It's a bit like paying to see an ageing rock star who is unique and you know may never play another concert. You just want to say you were there. And then I noticed on their website that they've opened a branch in Harrods, and another in Dubai. Maybe there are some similarities to Starbucks after all...

Caffe' Florian, Piazza San Marco, Venice

Tel 041 520 5641

Caffe' Florian

Locanda Canal, Venice

Venice is, on the whole, a city of gentle sounds, free as it is of the rush of roads and traffic. Market stallholders feel no need to shout. The distant 'hoi!' of a gondolier around the corner of some still backwater, the gentle strains of a string quartet in Piazza San Marco, the metallic ring of footsteps in an empty alley are all evocative, but unobtrusive. Even the throb of boat engines and the horns of the vaporetti on the Canal Grande are somehow subdued. But the sound that all Venetians listen for, can pick out above and through all others, is the city's siren; the warning, the harbinger of high tides, of acqua alta.

One blast of the siren alerts the city to the likelihood of flooding (so stay tuned), then further emissions spell out the expected magnitude (how far up your house the water might come). In a time when most of us are glued to our radios, televisions, computers and phones for the latest news, this simple sonic alert remains a neatly effective way to reach the majority of Venice's populus, wherever they are and whatever they're doing. An efficient, well-rehearsed response quickly kicks into action, as flood boards are installed in front of shops and walking platforms assembled. We saw, and heard, it happen one watery September.

Locanda Canal is a small, tucked away hotel with comfortable if unspectacular rooms. It reminded me vaguely of a David Lynch film. The walls of the corridor were lined with padded silk that subsided disconcertingly to the touch. We were served a modest breakfast each morning in a compact room with wooden floors and beamed ceiling, sitting just that bit closer than comfortable to our fellow guests, while an extremely petite young waitress wearing thin latex gloves wordlessly made the most incredible cappuccino. The hotel entrance gives out onto the Fondamenta del Remedio and stepping out one morning into heavy rain we noticed that the level of the deep green canal was considerably higher than the previous day. Other canals we passed were the same, and by midday the lagoon had spilled over the Riva degli Shiavoni and was lapping at the base of the Leone di San Marco. A buzz of expectation ran amongst the tourists in the Piazza, excited as children at the novelty of a city full of water.

Not so for the Venetians: just resigned frustration perhaps. And a quiet acceptance.

Locanda Canal, Fondamenta del Remedio, Castello 4422/c - 30122 Venezia

Tel 041 523 4538

Locanda Canal

B&B Accademia, Venice

Venice has an abundance of many things. Water, obviously. Tourists, clearly. Dimly lit calle and dripping sottoporteghi. Gondolas. Art. And graffiti. There's a lot of self expression in Venice.

This particular piece of plebeian art was right outside the window of our first floor rooms at the B&B Accademia in Dorsoduro, and during our short stay here we grew to quite like it. It acted as a landmark, assuring us that we'd turned the right corner on the way back; reminding us to turn left as we left in the morning. Appearing mainly on temporary structures, the graffiti comes and goes, appropriately transient in a city of such crumbling history which is itself passing away, and might not even remain in as few as fifty years, they say. What Venice may no longer have in abundance is time. In the comfortable rooms of this lovely old bed and breakfast the polished parquet floors, the original shutters, the heavy door furniture, even the creaks and groans seem stoically rooted in the past, as if denying the prospect of such an insubstantial future.

We fell asleep to the sounds of the evening's last vaporetto chugging away into the night, and woke to the morning's first, noisily disgorging its passengers into the alley below our window. The autumn days when we were there were damp and grey, only occasionally broken by a pale, ineffectual sun. We opened the French doors of the breakfast room hopefully one morning, only to close them against the chill before we'd finished our coffee. It was that time of year when a shroud of quiet melancholy seems to fall over the city (and nowhere does melancholy like Venice), as if in mourning for summer past. Or maybe in mourning for Venice itself. The swell slapped the gondolas on the Riva degli Shiavoni and a keen wind blew in off the lagoon. The gondoliers had put on their coats and pulled up their collars. By mid afternoon in the Campo Santa Margherita the few stallholders had begun to pack up and head for home, leaving only puddles of water where they had cleaned down their stalls and a dog snuffling for scraps. In the empty Rialto fish market at dusk the heavy red tarpaulins between the pillars snapped and billowed in the breeze. At night our footsteps echoed along the alleys, filled with the foggy yellow light of the city's lamps, and with black shadows. Venice's ghosts surge easily in on nights like this.

Perhaps one day, maybe sooner rather than later, they'll have the city to themselves again.

Accademia Bed and Breakfast, Dorsoduro 1054, Venice

Tel 041 5221 113

Accademia Bed and Breakfast

Al Vecio Pipa, Burano

The islands of the Venetian lagoon are like children from the same family who share common parents but have developed their own characters and gone their separate ways. Murano is industrial and commercial, still churning out glass in its furnaces located a safe distance from the city. Atmospheric San Michele, the island of the dead, groans under the weight of Venice's departed (but only temporarily, until they are removed and deposited in the ossuary, in readiness for the next inevitable occupants). Torcello exudes abandonment: a portent of Venice's own eventual fate, perhaps. So Burano, with its brightly painted houses and displays of delicate lace, feels the most cheerfully wayward of the offspring, even on a misty autumn day.

The bright colours of the houses were traditionally employed, apparently, to help the island's fishermen find their way back home on murky days and nights. Days like this. Today they have become a design statement. Philippe Starke owns three houses here, apparently. So it's hard, when wandering Burano's streets, to know what's real and what's pastiche. Those nets and sticks outside that small house, are they awaiting a fisherman's next trip or just there for effect? The fishing boats tied up at the side of the canal; do they really fish any more, or just take tourists on safe little rides into the lagoon? That lace in the window, is it really made by hand here, or on some machine in China?

And then we stumbled upon 'Al Vecio Pipa' for lunch, and all seemed real again. An elegant wood panelled dining room. A reserved but efficient waiter; older, wiser. And very good food. This place must host tourists by the boatload, but seems to have resisted any temptation to lower itself to the common denominator that so often results. We ate risotto with a brisk taste of the lagoon and drank crisp white wine. An elderly, elegant French couple were the only other diners. After lunch the mist thickened and even the bright colours of the houses were subdued in the greyness. We chugged back across the water as if surrounded by cotton wool, the dim votive lamps of the Fondamente Nuove appearing suddenly as we docked.

Behind us, the cemetery, the foundries, the forsaken church and the colourful houses out there in the lagoon had slipped away: receded into the insubstantial fragments of our imagination.

Al Vecio Pipa, Via San Mauro 397, 30012 Burano

Tel 041 730045

Even the website seems to have disappeared in the mist.

Ristorante - Pizzeria Casin dei Nobili, Venice

Casin dei Nobili's emblem is a mildly saucy rendition of two nubile young things, and signs at the bar cheekily refer to matters like how much half an hour costs and warnings not to manhandle the girls until you've paid the madam. None too subtle hints at the building's history.

Nubile young things are still employed here, but now they bring menus, wine and food, and a welcoming smile that's a refreshing change in a city with its fair share of sullen waiting staff. Our own NYT was especially cheerful and keen to practice her English. At one point her enthusiasm got the better of her and a plate of food destined for the next table dropped from her hand to the floor with a crash. No matter. She still smiled.

We shared a plate of warm seafood antipasti – octopus and squid and prawns and other things – then whole bass baked with thinly sliced potatoes and a crispy, salty, lemony fritto misto. All excellent. We skipped dessert, but couldn't resist a liquirizia with our coffee. We've come to know these licorice-cough-medicine drinks as 'Berties', for reasons which some of you will fathom, and I think they've become mildly addictive.

We left some time later, the happier, warmer, slightly fuzzier and fuller, and feeling distinctly less nubile than when we'd arrived.

Ristorante - Pizzeria Casin dei Nobili, Venezia, S. Barnaba, Dorsoduro 2765

Tel 041 241 1841

It's reassuring somehow that a restaurant can drum up so much custom without having its own website (or one that I can find).

Al Nono Risorto, Venice

Fegato alla Veneziana sounds more romantic, doesn't it, than liver and onions? But that's what it amounts to, and they serve up a fine plate of it in the cosy dining rooms of Al Nono Risorto, just over the bridge from Campo San Cassiano. We stumbled upon it at first, then it became our 'neighbourhood restaurant' when we stayed a week in winter in an apartment at the edge of the square.

The restaurant comprises a series of dining rooms. The first, straight off the street, has a high ceiling, a bar and terrazzo floor tiles reminiscent of a French brasserie. Other rooms are smaller, and lower. When the restaurant is busy it's all bustle and noise and the staff of bright young things, some of whom seem more interested in how they look than what you have ordered, can be distracted. On one occasion when the restaurant was heaving and breaking the sound barrier I ordered fegato but was brought a steak (and a pretty raw one at that).

But don't let that put you off. This place has atmosphere. Enter into the spirit of it all and you'll enjoy it (as long as you don't have sensitive ears). We also ate pizza and pasta and chicken and seafood and other dishes that were excellent and extremely good value. The restaurant owner sat inside the door and checked every bill as diners came to pay – and rounded each one down. Well he did ours anyway. Nice touch.

We've only eaten here in winter, when the adjoining canopied garden was tired and closed, but I can imagine that it's a lovely space in which to eat in the warmer months. On winter evenings the light from the restaurant casts a warm glow onto the pavement outside, making it almost imperative to stop and read the handwritten menu taped to the window.

If you pass and hesitate, go in. You won't be disappointed.

Al Nono Risorto, Santa Croce 2338, Sottoportego di Siora Bettina, Venice 30121

Tel 041 524 1169

Here's another place without its own website. They obviously attach more importance to food than technology, which is fine by me. You'll find plenty of reviews out there though.

Hotel Marconi, Venice

There's really only one way to arrive in Venice in style. Within minutes of landing at Marco Polo airport we were bouncing across the lagoon, the wind in our hair, the summer sun (and broad smiles) on our faces, in a sleek and beautiful boat. Varnished wood, polished brass, soft yellow leather seats. But we stood, to catch every glimpse of the approaching skyline.

Finding a chink in what appeared an impenetrable façade, our boatman turned in stealthily, as if to take the city by surprise, creeping slowly into Venice along a narrow, silent, sunless alley of still green water. Suddenly we emerged into broader water and burst into a scene so bright and intense and animated it was as if we'd been thrust onto the set of an epic film – scene painting by Canaletto, choreography by Busby Berkley. Just beyond the Rialto bridge we docked and our luggage was lifted up onto the pavement directly outside our hotel.

The Marconi was elegant, welcoming and relaxed. A tiny reception and lounge, directly off the fondamenta, were elaborately decorated and furnished, and adorned with original paintings. Our room on the first floor had beautifully plastered and painted walls, solid wooden furniture, a wooden bed-head hand-painted with garlands of flowers, and Murano glass light fittings. The floor, as throughout the hotel, was a marvellous terrazzo. Our room was at the rear of the building, and the view from our window, or lack of it, was the only disappointment - we looked directly onto a matrix of scaffolding tubes and planks. But it hardly mattered.

Breakfast at the Marconi was taken in a ground floor room at the back of the hotel, and the breakfast buffet offered an excellent selection of ham, cheese, scrambled eggs, spicy sausages, bread, pastries, cakes, yogurt, fruit, juices, tea and coffee to start the day. The room was pleasantly furnished but with strangely frosted orange windows, which cast a sunny glow into the room but obscured any view of the outside, other than occasional vague shapes moving nearby. One such vague shape became clearer as it moved towards us, just outside the window behind me, sat on the window ledge and then proceeded to remove its jeans and pull on a pair of shorts.

I think we had just experienced an Italian builder's bum.

Hotel Marconi, Riva del Vin, San Polo, 729 - 30125 Venezia (VE)

Hotel Marconi, Venice