Travel Advice for Tourists: If You Don't Do This in Venice, You Need to Have Your IQ Tested

This is what you should do when you visit Venice, or I’m going to get so mad at you it’s not even funny!

First, you should go to Piazza San Marco like everybody else because it’s the most beautiful square in the world with the restored freschi on Basilica San Marco and the majestic Doge Palace facing the lagoon, but you WILL go way before 9 AM or after 8 PM unless you’re suicidal or want to bond with 25 Chinese tour groups, two thousand cruise passengers, and 333 pimpled teenagers from Belgium.

Also, you will NOT - I repeat NOT buy a selfie stick for 3 Euros because then you can be sure I'll unfriend you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or worse, I'll send you signed copies of my third novel that nobody liked except my mother, and she's dead.

However, on your second day, you WILL get up at 5.05 AM, throw away your cell phone and the wrinkled map you got for free at your overpriced hotel that's either close to the station or Piazza San Marco, which are the WORST places to get a hotel, but you're forgiven because you probably didn't know better - and now you WILL get lost in the REAL Venezia, enjoying the narrow canals, the red bras flapping in the breeze, the seagulls attacking the garbage bags outside the medieval palazzi, and tears will stream down your face because you didn't know how gorgeous, turquoise, and calm Serenissima was at dawn.

Yes, it's true. You WILL get lost without your GPS.

Your kids WILL scream at you.

Your partner WILL divorce you, but who cares because you've experienced the greatest city on earth before it's destroyed by mass urination, and the rising sea that some day will leave Venice at the bottom of the laguna like a 21st century Atlantis.

 Copyright Peter H. Fogtdal, Danish Accent who has visited Venice about twenty times, and suffers from a serious Venezia-addiction for centuries that can't be cured, thank God!

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