Gondola ride in Venice

Gondola ride in Venice: a seat on a shared gondola, or the boat to yourselves

The rides we sell come in two kinds. On a shared gondola you buy a seat, and up to five passengers ride together; on a private one you pay for the boat, and it’s just you, whether you’re one or five. Every ride lasts 30 minutes on the water, and the shared ones start on land, with an introduction to the gondola and a visit to the Gondola Gallery near Piazza San Marco. The gallery holds the gondoliers’ tools, a gondola cut in half and a virtual-reality ride along the Grand Canal, and someone takes you round it in about 10 minutes.

The classic ride starts at €39 and is the one we’d book if you want a gondola and nothing more. You start with 20 minutes on land, then spend half an hour on the water, about 50 minutes in all, and you can cancel until the end of the day before. On a single or random seat you may be split from your group; seats together cost a little more at checkout.

If you’d like someone to point things out as you go, the ride with live commentary starts at €39, with a guide in English, French or Spanish; seats are given out according to weight. The Bridge of Sighs ride, from €35, starts with a 15-minute walk and has the commentary on your phone. Both can be cancelled up to 24 hours before.

For a couple, a family or a proposal, the private gondola costs €122 for the boat and up to five people, by day. There’s no guide and no introduction: you check in with the gondoliers at their stand, and the ride ends where it started. None of the rides we sell, private or shared, lists a singer among what’s included.

Where the gondola ride goes: the small canals, the Grand Canal or the Bridge of Sighs

The classic and commentary rides leave from near Piazza San Marco and slip through the narrow canals first, between house walls, before coming out on the Grand Canal; the private gondola starts on the Grand Canal itself, at the Giglio stand. On the way you pass La Fenice, Venice’s opera house, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of modern art, the Gritti Palace hotel, the domed Salute church and the Punta della Dogana, where the Grand Canal meets the lagoon.

The Bridge of Sighs ride goes the other way, out onto the open water of St Mark’s Basin in front of the Doge’s Palace, and back under the bridge the prisoners once crossed.

On his Venice pages, the guidebook author Rick Steves calls a gondola ride the ultimate after-dark activity in the city, and that’s the slot the evening ride on the Grand Canal fills.

Before your gondola ride: where to meet and who can ride

All our rides tell you to arrive 10 to 15 minutes early, and the meeting point is on your voucher. The shared rides are run by Venice Tours, and all three start a short walk from Piazza San Marco.

The rides don’t leave in exceptionally bad weather, very high tides or strong wind, and wind can change the route; the Bridge of Sighs ride carries on in the rain. None of them can take a wheelchair, and the Gondola Gallery isn’t accessible either; large bags aren’t allowed into it. Babies under 2 ride free on the commentary and Bridge of Sighs rides.

Gondola rides included in two Venice passes

Two Venice passes let you choose between a gondola ride and the boat trip to the islands, alongside the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s Basilica.

Venice’s City Pass and the Museum Pass are museum passes and don’t include a gondola, and neither does a vaporetto ticket; for what each pass does include, see Venice Pass and Venice’s museum passes.

How a Venice gondola is built, and why it’s black

A gondola is about 10 metres long, with a flat bottom and a lopsided hull: it’s built 23 centimetres wider on the left, and the gondolier stands at the back on the right and rows with a single oar.

Gondolas were already in the paintings of Vittore Carpaccio, the Venetian painter, at the end of the 15th century. They’ve been black since a law against luxury in 1562, when there were about 10,000 of them, and today’s rules still ask for glossy black inside and out. The steel ferro on the bow is a single piece, and its front ends in six teeth, like a comb.

The rules even cover the gondolier’s shirt: white with blue or red stripes, with a straw hat allowed. A licence can pass down within a family, to a relative who has rowed the family gondola for four years, and the first woman gondolier got hers in 2010.