$16.99Film & Fiction
Venice Audio Walking Tours
Self-guided, narrated walks through Venice. Buy a tour once, download it, and hear the story at each stop while you walk at your own pace.
Tours from $6.99
Friends walk free. One purchase covers everyone on your walk. Start the tour, invite your friends to join, and it plays on every phone in your group.
5.0 on Google Play
Venice audio tours
Each tour is a mapped route with narration at every stop. Buy it once and it is yours to keep, no subscription.
$16.99Film & Fiction
$14.99Games IRL$7.99City Highlights
$6.99City HighlightsWhat to expect on a Venice audio walking tour
A Venice audio walk moves at the city's own pace, the tight lane, the sudden campo full of light, the bridge with a view down a quiet canal, with narration timed to each stop so you can stay lost in the maze on purpose instead of checking a map.
The Venice Dorsoduro Walk starts at the Punta della Dogana, the old customs point where the Grand Canal meets the lagoon, then passes the great plague church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Accademia gallery. It continues past a working gondola boatyard and through Campo Santa Margherita, the student quarter's living room, finishing at the Frari and Titian's Assumption. It's about 2.5 kilometers, roughly 34 minutes of walking, and shares no stops with the Rialto route.
The Venice Rialto and San Marco Walk covers the line almost everyone tries on their first day, starting among the fish and vegetable stalls of the Rialto Market, then crossing the Grand Canal on the Rialto Bridge.
From there it threads a maze of lanes to a hidden spiral staircase and the opera house of La Fenice before opening out into Piazza San Marco, finishing on the waterfront at the Bridge of Sighs. It's about 1.9 kilometers, roughly 26 minutes of walking, through some of the busiest and most beautiful ground in the city.
Where to walk in Venice
A few of the stops you will pass, and why they are worth slowing down for.
Santa Maria della Salute
Santa Maria della Salute is one of the great sights of Venice, an octagonal church crowned by a huge dome, with giant scrolled buttresses curling around its base. In 1630 plague swept through Venice and killed something like a third of the city's people, and the Senate vowed to build a church to the Virgin if the city was spared. Salute means both health and salvation. Building something this heavy on the mud of the lagoon was a feat in itself, with foundations resting on more than a million wooden piles. Every year on 21 November, Venice still keeps its side of the bargain, laying a bridge of boats across the canal to light a candle here.
A Venetian campo
Campi like this one are Venice's real living rooms, small squares with a well head at the center and a parish bell tower standing over faded, lived-in facades. Dorsoduro is full of them, quieter and greener than the crowded routes around San Marco, and this walk uses several to cut between its bigger stops, from the art museums near the Grand Canal to the working boatyard at San Trovaso and the student bars of Campo Santa Margherita. Away from the gondolas, a campo is where Venice does its everyday business: children kicking a ball, laundry strung overhead, a boat engine idling just out of sight.
Rialto Bridge
For centuries, a bridge on this spot was the only way to cross the Grand Canal on foot, and the single bold stone arch standing here now was finished in 1591 by the architect Antonio da Ponte, after critics predicted it would fall. It still carries two rows of shops and a constant river of visitors and gondoliers passing beneath. The Rialto itself, the patch of higher ground around the bridge, is where Venice really began as a city, a market and money center for the Republic long before San Marco became its showpiece. Stop at the top of the bridge and look both ways along the canal before continuing into the lanes that lead toward San Marco.
Piazza San Marco
Framed by arcades on both sides, with the domes and golden mosaics of Saint Mark's Basilica at the far end, Piazza San Marco is often called the finest drawing room in Europe, a line usually credited to Napoleon. The basilica was built to house the body of Saint Mark, smuggled out of Alexandria under a layer of pork so customs officers wouldn't look too closely. Above the main doors stand four bronze horses, copies of ancient originals taken from Constantinople in 1204 and now kept safely inside. Around the square, historic cafes under the arcades, including Florian, have served coffee here since the eighteenth century.
Bridge of Sighs
This small, enclosed bridge of white stone, with two barred windows, links the Doge's Palace to the grim block of the old prisons, built around 1600 to carry prisoners from the courtrooms to their cells across the water. The romantic name came later, popularized by Lord Byron, on the idea that prisoners sighed here at their last glimpse of the lagoon. Venice's most famous jailbreak happened nearby: Giacomo Casanova, locked up in the cells under the palace's lead roof in 1755, broke out through the roof more than a year later and walked free. Lean on the rail just in front of it for the classic view back toward the bridge.
Get the Audio Tour in 3 Simple Steps
All in the free Walk With Me app, and the first stops of every tour are free to try.
Tap the Gold Headphones and Pick a Tour
01
Walk It Solo or Invite Someone
02
Press Play and Walk
03
Handcrafted for Your Time in the City
These tours aren't a checklist of sights. They're made to be walked slowly, headphones on, eyes on the city.
Meditative and Immersive
Each story is told where it happened. The app chimes when you reach a stop, one tap starts the story, and the stretch between stops is yours to take in at your own pace.
Handcrafted With Care
We choose every route and every stop ourselves and shape each story with care, so the time you have in the city goes to the places most worth seeing.
Better With Someone
Every walk is better with someone beside you, so if you can bring a friend, we really hope you do. That's why one purchase covers everyone you invite: they join your tour free.