Last Updated on: 15th September 2021, 11:13 pm
Looking for beautiful quotes about Venice, Italy? Venice is a city that has inspired novelists, historians, and travel writers for centuries.
From the majesty of its canals to the sumptuousness of Carnivale, the city never ceases to delight. Whether you’re looking for travel inspiration or Venice Instagram captions, here are my favorite Venice quotes.
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My Favorite Travel Booking Sites for 2023
These are my favorite companies that I use on my own travels.
Protect Your Trip via Safety Wing
Find the best city tours, day tours, bus tours, & skip-the-line tickets on GetYourGuide and Viator.
Find the best deals on hotels & vacation rentals on Booking.com.
For English-speaking private airport transfers, book through Welcome Pickups.
For road trips and independent travel, rent a car through Discover Cars.
Find information and cruise reviews on Cruise Critic.
For packing and travel essentials order via Amazon.
Book an affordable family or romantic photography session on your trip through Flytographer (Use the code HISTORYFANGIRL for 10% off your first photoshoot).
For travel guidebooks to have with you during your trip, I always pick one or two from Rick Steves and Lonely Planet.
My Favorite Quotes about Venice, Italy
Here are the best Venice travel quotes (though I’m always looking for more)! If you love travel quotes, you might also want to check out my post on 250 Inspirational Travel Quotes.
Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
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Venice is eternity itself.
-Joseph Brodsky
Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.
-Frances Mayes
Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn’t have Rome. We wouldn’t have Florence. We wouldn’t have the marvel that is Venice.
-Matteo Renzi
I will never forget experiencing Venice for the first time. It feels like you are transported to another time – the art, music, food and pure romance in the air is like no other place.
-Elizabeth Berkley
Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
-I
Venice never quite seems real, but rather an ornate film set suspended on the water.
-Frida Giannini
I always wanted to go to Venice. It’s supposed to be the romance capital of the world.
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This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty – this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.
-Thomas Mann
I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness.
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An orange gem resting on a blue glass plate: it’s Venice seen from above.
-Henry James
If I could live in one city and do every single thing I do there, I would choose Venice. You can’t turn your head without seeing something amazing.
-Nile Rodgers
Is it worthwhile to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?
-William Dean Howells
Everything in Venice is just a little bit creepy, as much as it’s beautiful.
-Christopher Moore
It’s so easy for me to get caught up in the feeling of a city like Venice, where everything is just beautiful color and gorgeous buildings that are so peaceful. You can roam around and get lost in the labyrinth.
-Nanette Lepore
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
-Henry James
A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.
-Arthur Symons
I’m often in Venice in November and December, when it’s foggy and wintry, and the decorations in the shops and the lights in the churches make the place feel both Christmassy and melancholic.
-Juergen Teller
When I seek another word for ‘music’, I never find any other word than ‘Venice.’
-Friedrich Nietzsche
When writers for adults contemplate Venice, they behold decay, dereliction, and death. Thomas Mann, Daphne du Maurier, L. P. Hartley, and Salley Vickers have all dispatched hapless protagonists to Italy, where they see Venice – and die.
-Jan Mark
The building I most admire is the Doges Palace in Venice, both by day and by night. Looking at it from the lagoon, it resembles a floating kilim carpet. I love all the bridges which connect houses, people, gardens and palaces. I also love moats to isolate yourself. A ha-ha for secrecy, as in every English country garden.
-Anouska Hempel
Oh yes, it was my Venice! Beautiful,
With melancholy, ghostly beauty—old,
And sorrowful, and weary—yet so fair,
So like a queen still, with her royal robes,
Full of harmonious colour, rent and worn!
–
In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china tea set were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky.
-Joseph Brodsky
She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.
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The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.
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It seemed like a magical city, floating on the lagoon as if conjured by an enchanter’s wand.
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General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.
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The quality of Venice that accomplishes what religion so often cannot is that Venice has made peace with the waters.
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Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.
-Roger Ebert
Paris is an ideal place to become informed, while Venice is a place to think and write.
-Pontus Hulten
Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world’s attic, there’s another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it’s Cardiff.
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I became fascinated by marionettes, which I first saw in Venice. They were so haunted and so alive. You walked by them, and you could feel their presence, with their beady eyes just fixed on you.
-Laura Amy Schlitz
If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you’ve imagined. Venice is — Venice is better.
-Fran Lebowitz
And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.
-Donna Leon
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
-Truman Capote
My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
-Ben van Berkel
Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of s** and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.
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The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.
–
Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates.
-Gary Inbinder
By day it is filled with boat traffic – water
buses, delivery boats, gondolas – if something floats
and it’s in Venice, it moves along the Grand Canal.
And by daylight, it is one of the glories of the Earth.
But at night, especially when the moon is full
and the soft illumination reflects off the water and
onto the palaces – I don’t know how to describe
it so I won’t, but if you died and in your will you
asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the
Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon,
everyone would know this about you – you loved and understood beauty.
–
In Venice, if you didn’t know where you were going, you usually ended up in the Piazza and since that was always true, maybe it was always where you were going.
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Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections … and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold.
-Joseph Brodsky
My first impression of Venice was that it might be hard to make anything happen there. Everything seemed to have already happened. Venice seemed like a kind of exalted remembering.
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Though in Venice you may sit in courtyards of stone, and your heels may click up marble stairs, you cannot move without riding upon or crossing the waters that someday will carry you in dissolution to the sea.
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In Venice, things not always as they first appear.
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His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian.
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In the end, there’s always this city. As long as it exists, I don’t believe that I, or for that matter, anyone, can be mesmerized or blinded by romantic tragedy.
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Sleep: the moon still hasn’t moved the width of a constellation since you were a girl. Since you have become a woman, the stars that stand above the halls of Palladios have not yet disappeared behind the domes of San Marco. But only since then has the world become the world.
–
I had my dreams of Venice, but nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.
-Arthur Symons
The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists – incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.
-Mary McCarthy
Have you read any beautiful quotes about Venice recently? If so, leave them in the comments, and I’ll add it to the list!
5 Things to Pack for Your Trip to Venice
The Lonely Planet Italy guidebook or the Rick Steves Italy guidebook for your trip. It can be kind of a pain to find the major guidebooks once you arrive in Italy, or you’ll find them overpriced. I always like to pick mine up ahead of time.
An Unlocked Cell Phone so that you can use an Italian sim card while here to help navigate the trains.
Backup Charging Bank for your cell phone since you’ll be using it as a camera, GPS system, and general travel genie.
A Camera since Venice is super photogenic. I use a mix of my Nikon D810 and my Samsung8 smartphone these days.
A Great Day Bag so you can carry what you need with you (like your camera, snacks, water, sunscreen, cash, etc). My current favorite is the Pacsafe Citysafe, which is especially great for Italy because it has many anti-theft features.
More Italy Travel Resources
Here are some resources to help you plan your trip to Italy. If you’re headed to Venice, check out my podcast episode Rick Steves Over Brunch: Venice and my collection of hilarious Venice puns and jokes.
If you’re going to be visiting Rome, check out my interview with Mike Duncan on the history of the Roman Forum. I also have three episodes about Rome on Rick Steves Over Brunch, including this episode on Rome recorded with Rick Steves himself!
I also have guides to visiting Ostia Antica from Rome and how to choose between Pompeii or Ostia Antica.
Headed to Milan? Be sure to check out these beautiful ancient Milan churches while you’re there!
Finally, check out my list of books to read before your vacation in Italy.
Don’t Forget About Travel Insurance!
Before you leave for Italy make sure you have a valid Travel Insurance Policy because accidents happen on the road. I pay for World Nomads, and I happily recommend them. It’s especially important to get travel insurance if you’ll be hanging out in cities (like Venice…ahem) where tourists can be the victims of pickpockets. Italy is the only country I’ve been to (out of almost seventy) where I’ve had someone try to pick my pocket!
I have been a paying customer of World Nomads for travel insurance for two years, and I happily recommend them. If you get sick, injured, or have your stuff stolen, you’ll be happy to have the ability to pay for your medical bills or replace what’s stolen or broken.
Pin this guide to the Best Quotes about Venice & Venice Instagram Captions for Your Trip!
