Steven Varni

Venetians are angry lately, and in a city in which the number of tourists on any given day is greater than the number of residents, their anger is intensified by the suspicion that no one—not even their own elected city …

That my pronunciation of Italian words often falls short of the mark, well, I’ll be the first one to admit that. Still, I was a little surprised when my son, Sandro, first started correcting it. “An-chee-o,” he instructed me—not that …

Soon after starting an Italian-English language exchange with a young Venetian here I made the bold assertion that there are ten essential words or phrases in every language that will unlock not just the underlying logic of the language, but …

One of the first things my Venetian friend, whom I’ll call “A”, said to me when I met him two years ago in his father’s lace showroom near Piazza San Marco was, “ This place will be a museum soon, …

When I  made my first poorly-planned and short-lived attempt at the age of 26 to live in Venice in the early 1990s, I thought of it as the ultimate place of art and artifice. I imagined that by traveling to …

When it came time to buy our Christmas tree this year, we once again had to do so without the use of a boat, which my six-year-old son, Sandro, who seems to have a native Venetian’s strict sense of life’s …

Talk long enough to anyone who has worked in the Venetian hospitality industry and he or she will inevitably get around to mentioning (with a roll of the eyes) the time a foreign tourist inquired by phone about on-site parking …

Pay even the briefest visit to Piazza San Marco around noon these days and you’ll instantly discover, or be reminded of, why seasoned travelers have long considered summer to be the absolute worst time to visit Venice. What Napoleon is …

When part of the Biblioteca Marciana, across the piazzetta from the Doge’s Palace, collapsed during its construction in 1538 its architect, the eminent Jacopo Sansovino, was immediately thrown into jail. A group of Sansovino’s influential friends, including the great Titian, …

Since the end of its republic, Venice has been a favorite spot for both upper-case Romantics (such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley) and lower-case romantics (the rest of us) to contemplate in its famously crumbling palazzi and churches the …