Doge's Palace

Doge’s Palace tickets and passes: the palace and three museums on one entry

A Doge’s Palace ticket with a booked time lets you in from 9:00, when the palace opens; without one, entry starts at 12:00, and Venice’s own City Pass works the same way.

The palace is on all four Venice passes we sell. Look at them if your list also has St Mark’s Basilica, a gondola, the islands or more of the civic museums.

The first two are bundles put together by Tiqets, the ticket company we sell through: in both you pick one option per block, each ticket carries its own date, and none of it can be refunded.

The Museum Pass works the other way round, with no booking at all, so it suits a slower week of museums. The City Pass costs €62.90, and like the other three it leaves out the vaporetto. If you’re weighing them up for the whole trip, Venice Pass and Venice’s museum passes goes through them one by one.

If the palace is the only big visit on your list, buy the ticket on its own. Our fast-track ticket costs €35, with the day and time you choose: you queue in the pre-paid line, walk through the Armoury and cross the Bridge of Sighs. Children from 6 to 14, students from 15 to 25 and over-65s pay a reduced price at checkout.

Once bought, that ticket can’t be cancelled or changed. If your dates may still move, the other fast-track ticket, from €35, has a free-cancellation version at checkout. For the hidden side of the palace, the Secret Itineraries tour comes as one of the palace options in the Venice Pass.

Fast track gets you past the ticket queue, not the bag check: bags and rucksacks can still be checked at the museum entrances.

Doge’s Palace opening hours and what you can take in

The palace opens every day of the week, and since 1 November it has been on winter hours.

The museums’ own app, MUVE, has an audio guide for the palace in six languages, English among them, switched on with a QR code once you’re inside. The ordinary route has a lift and an accessible toilet on the ground floor; the prisons and the Armoury are the parts a wheelchair can’t reach.

Inside the Doge’s Palace: from the Giants’ Staircase to the Great Council hall

The doge was the elected head of the Republic, chosen for life by the Great Council, and the palace was where he lived and where Venice was governed and judged. The visit doesn’t follow the floors in order: it climbs and comes back down, starting in the courtyard by the Giants’ Staircase. Mars and Neptune guard it, statues by Jacopo Sansovino, who also built the Marciana Library across the square.

From the first-floor loggia, where the “lion’s mouths” took anonymous denunciations, the Golden Staircase climbs to the second floor. That’s where the Senate met, and the Council of Ten. The Armoury comes next, with more than 2,000 pieces.

The route then comes down to the Hall of the Great Council, 53 by 25 metres. Every patrician man over 25 had a seat in it, and the frieze under the ceiling shows the first 76 doges. Behind the throne hangs Paradise, by Jacopo Tintoretto and his workshop, painted between 1588 and 1592 and one of the longest canvas paintings in the world.

Almost everything you see on these walls dates from after the fire of 1577, when Veronese, the Tintorettos and Palma il Giovane redecorated the halls. Two paintings are being restored, Veronese’s Rape of Europa and Bassano’s Return of Jacob to Canaan: copies hang in their place, and you can see the restoration in the Sala del Liagò.

The Bridge of Sighs and the New Prisons, on every ticket

From the last rooms of the first floor, the route goes down into the Bridge of Sighs. It was built in 1614 to link the palace’s courtrooms with the New Prisons on the other side of the canal, and it’s enclosed, with two corridors side by side: the one you walk through led from the courts to the cells. Venice had decided on the New Prisons in the mid-16th century, with larger cells and more air than the old ones in the palace, and the building was one of the first state prisons in Europe built for the purpose.

The name came two centuries later, in the Romantic period: the sighs were those of prisoners taking a last look at the lagoon and San Giorgio through the small barred windows. After the cells you come back into the palace, by the bridge or through the floors below, and the visit ends in the courtyard.

The Secret Itineraries tour: the Piombi and Casanova’s cell

The ordinary route leaves out the rooms where the Republic kept its secrets, and the Secret Itineraries tour is the way into them. It starts at a narrow door in the courtyard and goes down to the Pozzi, the damp cells with a plank bed and a bucket, before climbing through the Secret Chancellery, lined with archive cupboards, and the Torture Chamber.

At the top are the Piombi, cells under the lead roof that gave them their name, where the Council of Ten held its prisoners, many of them political. Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian adventurer, was locked up here and later wrote about it, and his two cells have been rebuilt. Near the end come the Inquisitors’ Room, under a ceiling by Tintoretto, and the room of the Three Heads, with its secret passage into the hall next door.

Arriving more than 15 minutes late means you lose your place. The tour includes the Bridge of Sighs, the Armoury and the prisons, and afterwards you’re free to walk the rest of the palace on your own.

Across the square: the Correr Museum and the Marciana Library

The other half of your ticket is across the square, in the Napoleonic Wing at the far end of Piazza San Marco. A monumental staircase takes you into the Correr Museum, with its neoclassical rooms and the history of Venice in the Procuratie Nuove, and there’s a café on the first floor overlooking the square. The National Archaeological Museum is on the same route, with more than 1,300 pieces in the old Royal Palace.

The Marciana Library is part of the route too: Sansovino built it between 1537 and 1553 for the thousand-odd manuscripts Cardinal Bessarion gave the city in 1468. Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese worked on its great hall. In the rooms beyond it is Fra Mauro’s world map, drawn between 1457 and 1459 with about 3,000 inscriptions and the south at the top.

Getting to the Doge’s Palace

The palace stands on the Piazzetta, between Piazza San Marco and the water, with St Mark’s Basilica beside it. By waterbus, the closest stop is San Zaccaria on the Riva degli Schiavoni, served by lines 1, 4.1 and 5.1, with 5.2 from the Lido. Line 1 also stops at San Marco Vallaresso, and this winter line 2 from Piazzale Roma runs to San Marco Giardinetti until the 16:30 boat.

From the railway station or Piazzale Roma, line 1 takes you down the whole Grand Canal before San Zaccaria. If you’ll be on the water a few times that day, the Venice vaporetto covers single tickets and day passes.