The unexpected Venice

Behind this bookmark is a choice. And behind every choice, a reason worth telling.

We included a piece by Pieces of Venice in a gift for our partners — the people who make possible what we do every day: crafting tailor-made journeys with responsibility, attention, and a deep respect for detail.

This is an invitation to understand the thinking behind that choice. And, with it, our way of seeing La Serenissima and the lagoon that surrounds it.

Pieces of Venice: a fragment of the lagoon

The bookmark we chose is not a simple object, but a reflection of the values behind our way of travelling.

Made from the wood of the bricole — the poles that mark the canals of the Venice lagoon — it gives new life to a material shaped by water, salt and time. Once no longer able to serve its original purpose, this wood is recovered and transformed locally into objects that preserve both substance and memory.

Created by Luciano and Karin, the project reflects a thoughtful way of creating value, rooted in circular economy, local craftsmanship and social purpose. In 2020, it was recognised with the Compasso d’Oro, a mark of the cultural and environmental significance of an initiative that restores meaning to material otherwise lost.

That is why we chose it. Because it expresses a principle we believe in deeply: a beauty that does not consume, but gives back.

Venice has been told infinite times. We choose to tell it differently.
Not the city one passes through, but the one you enter with intention. Not what is displayed, but what is kept. Not the itinerary, but the encounter.

Just like the object you hold, our way of experiencing Venice begins with attention – to materials, to gestures, to people, and to the fragile balance that still binds it to its lagoon. What emerges is a more intimate city: shaped by water, revealed through craft, reached by slower ways, and understood through the lives that continue to sustain it.

The experiences that follow are not attractions, but invitations into the living fabric of Venice and its lagoon – moments chosen to reveal a place that still belongs to those who know where, and how, to look.

La Dolce Vita in Venice.

The city recedes slowly as the sails are raised. The Venice lagoon opens, wide and silent.

On board a historic yacht in Venice that once welcomed figures such as Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Venice shifts in perspective. Landing at Torcello, where Byzantine mosaics hold centuries of light. Gliding toward Pellestrina, a blade of land suspended between sea and lagoon.

Herons skim the water. Green islands scatter across the horizon. The silhouette of Venice catches fire at dusk.

On board, cocktails and canapés, or perhaps a dinner prepared by a Venetian chef, as the light turns to gold.

This is not an excursion. It is a statement of style.

There is a Venice that grows in brackish sand, that ripens between wind and water.

Sips and nibbles.

At Venissa, the cuisine is born from a recovered vineyard - the Dorona, an ancient grape variety once thought lost, brought back through years of patient work by a family that refused to let it disappear. The lagoon here is not merely backdrop: it is ingredient, climate, memory. Each dish becomes a conversation between land and water, between what the soil offers and what the kitchen makes of it. Lunch unfolds as both an agricultural and cultural narrative, a gesture of elegance that does not forget its roots.

Living craft.

Behind the Gothic façades, behind the heavy doors, an industrious city lives on. On Murano, glass takes shape between expert hands — molten, fluid, then suddenly permanent, holding light inside it like a small captured sun. In hidden ateliers, masks are not souvenirs but sculpture, each one a face that belongs to no one and to everyone. In textile workshops, light becomes fabric, a tradition stretching back centuries, still alive, still made by hand, guided by the same gestures passed from one generation to the next.

We enter these places with care, and with the privilege of being expected.

Private openings.

Venice was power, theatre, diplomacy. Its palaces were not built for spectacle alone, but for negotiation, for ceremony, for life conducted at the highest register - where art was an argument, and beauty was a language of its own. Some of these places are not visited during opening hours. Their doors open before the day begins, or after it ends.

At eight in the morning, the Palazzo Ducale belongs to almost no one: gilded halls still silent, the light arriving low across the lagoon, the weight of the Republic's centuries entirely present. In the evening, the same rooms become something else - private, theatrical, charged with a different kind of attention. Or later still, after closing, when the palace is given over entirely to those who know how to ask.

The Basilica di San Marco after nightfall is one of the rare experiences that resists description. Freed from the noise of the day, the mosaics hold their light differently. Access to the Pala d'Oro and the Crypt, in near-silence, becomes the kind of encounter that changes the way one reads a city.

A piano nobile lit by candlelight. An exclusive dinner among frescoes and stucco. A morning at the Peggy Guggenheim before the first visitor arrives, moving through Picasso, Ernst and Pollock with no one else in the room.

Here, history is not displayed: it is lived - on terms that belong entirely to those who enter.

The breathing waters.

The lagoon is not a backdrop. It is an ecosystem, an economy, a community.

Natural reserves like the Alberoni. Mudflats that shift with the tides. Fishermen who head out at dawn as their grandparents did before them. Birds nesting in the barene. Eels moving through the channels. The vegetable gardens of Sant'Erasmo feeding the city from across the water. Venice exists because the lagoon exists — and the lagoon exists because there are those who inhabit it, generation after generation.

We choose partners who are part of this ecosystem: not by declaration, but by daily practice. Pieces of Venice is one of them.

Explore with intention

Curated travel. Two words that only mean something when earned through years of listening to places, to the people who inhabit them, and to travellers who are ready to go deeper. We work with those who collect experiences, not things. Who know that the best journeys ask something in return: attention, curiosity, a willingness to slow down. That is the kind of travel we believe in, and the kind we design, across Italy and Switzerland, one journey at a time. As a Benefit Company, we measure our work not only by the journeys we create, but by the impact we leave behind: on the communities we work with, on the landscapes we move through, and on the cultural heritage we have a responsibility to protect.

The unexpected awaits