VENICE, ITALY (2024) | 10 Best Things To Do In Venice (Including hidden gems & travel tips) – YouTube

A lovely (and much-needed) green space debuted this fall when the garden (admission 12 euros, or about $12.70) of Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, a 16th-century church, opened to the public for the first time. Tucked behind a door in an alley called Calle dei Frati on Giudecca — a long island forming the south border of Venice proper — the newly renovated and replanted gardens are filled with cypresses, olive groves, fruit trees, trellised vines, and hundreds of flowers and plants. In winter, the marquee attraction is the early sunset view over the Adriatic Sea. A cafe serves espresso (€4), hot chocolate (€6.50) and more. Other half-hidden gems around Giudecca are CREA, an arts complex in a boatyard with several exhibition spaces, and the boutique of Fortuny, a century-old fabric manufacturer, in a gated industrial complex. (Just ring the bell.)

Someone at two-year-old Il Refettorio (translation: “The Refectory”) likes fire. Near the Scuola Grande di San Rocco — a historic building filled with works by the Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto — the stylishly angular and modern-minded restaurant serves several dishes featuring burned or smoked ingredients. These include steaks (from €9 per 100 grams), flambéed scallops with lumpfish roe and charred lemon (€24), and smoked sole with porcini mushrooms (€30). Fans of forest flavors might like the foamy mushroom soup larded with shaved white truffle, pork jowl and a poached egg (€28), while seafood lovers should consider grilled octopus tentacles on potato foam with droplets of tomato sauce (€28).

A pair of impressive new hotel bars are reinvigorating Venice’s cocktail scene. Centrally located in a palazzo that once held the Venice stock exchange, on Calle XXII Marzo, a street of luxury boutiques, is Nolinski Venezia. The hotel contains a velvety bar lined with some 4,000 books, from “Picasso: Between Cubism and Classicism” to “Yacht Interiors.” Peruse one with a Dandolo cocktail (chocolate-infused bourbon, white vermouth and Earl Grey tea; €25). More playful and (intentionally) 80s-kitsch, the plush Experimental Cocktail Club — housed in Il Palazzo Experimental hotel, in the Dorsoduro neighborhood — updates the Negroni with the Monsteroni (gin, Campari, vermouth, coconut oil and a cordial of stout ale; €15).