My boyfriend and I went to Venice in August this year. We had a nightmare getting there: firstly, due to a storm, Venice airport closed about 15 minutes before we were going to land so we had to land in Bologna and get a 2 hour coach to Venice, we arrived at Venice airport about 5 hours later than expected and got one of the Vaporetto boats from the airport to the city centre, on the boat I got eaten alive by mosquitos (definitely bring mosquito repellant), and then once we’d made it to the airbnb, my adaptor decided to blow up when I tried to plug it in. It was an annoyingly stressful first night but there was something extremely calm about Venice, probably the fact that there are no cars about so there was no noise or light pollution. How cool would it be to live somewhere like that?

Ok, so Venice is pretty expensive. The cheapest airbnb we could find was well above our budget, food and drink (apart from the wine yippee) were pretty expensive and the gondola prices were steep too. We read online that it was 80 euros for a 40 minute gondola ride but ours only lasted 20 minutes, it was a good experience because you get to learn about the city as you go, but I wouldn’t ever do it again.

We went up the Bell Tower in St. Marcs Square, the queue didn’t take too long and you do get a great view up top.

You’ll see lots of masquerade shops in Venice, the best one to visit in my opinion is Ca’ del Sol. It’s authentic, colourful and the owner sits there designing them right in the middle of the store.

Venice was a truly unique city that every traveller should visit. It’s pretty expensive but all you need is a couple of days there. We spent 2 days in Venice and then got a 3 hour train from Venice to Rome and spent a few days in Rome. Just a tip: the trains in Italy are really good and super cheap so if you are someone travelling from afar or want to kill two birds with one stone it’s quick and easy to get the train from one city to another.