Venice, Italy

Day 1

• St Mark's Basilica

  The basilica-only ticket is listed at €10, but individuals get an automatic 20% discount, and under-18s, students up to 26 and over-65s get a further 50%; the full ticket with the Pala d'Oro, Museum and Loggia dei Cavalli starts at €30, and the bell tower is separate at €15. Every ticket is issued in the holder's name. It opens at 9.30am and closes at 5.15pm, last entry 4.45pm, but on Sundays and feast days the basilica opens only at 2pm, and until then the sole space you can visit is the Museum with the Loggia. Residents of Venice and of the diocese enter free, the bell tower excepted.

• Doge's Palace

  There is no palace-only ticket: you buy 'The Museums of St Mark's Square', €35 full and €30 booked online at least thirty days ahead, €15 reduced, and it also covers the Correr, the Archaeological Museum and the Monumental Rooms of the Marciana. Open 9am-7pm from April to October and 9am-6pm from November to March, last entry an hour before; in summer it runs until 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays, which is by far the emptiest slot. The Secret Itineraries, through the administration offices and the Piombi cells, cost €40 including the palace and run only by booking, with a guide.

• Gallerie dell'Accademia

  It opens at 8.15am, before anything else in the city, and entry is free on the first Sunday of the month, as it is on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November. Here are Giorgione's Tempest, Carpaccio's St Ursula cycle and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, which is rarely on show, because light damages the paper and it is displayed only in rotation: go specially and you may find an empty wall. It sits in Dorsoduro at the foot of the Accademia bridge, where the St Mark's crowd never reaches.

Day 2

• Sarde in saor

  Sardines fried and then marinated in stewed onions, vinegar, raisins and pine nuts. It is not a restaurant recipe but a shipboard preserve: the saor kept fish edible for weeks at sea, and the raisins were there to blunt the vinegar. Which is why it has to rest at least a day and is never eaten fresh from the pan. Order it as a cicchetto at the counter, one piece at a time, standing: at a table, as a dish, the same thing costs three times as much.

• Bigoli in salsa

  Thick, rough wheat pasta pushed through a hand press, dressed with salted anchovies or sardines melted slowly into onion: no tomato, no garlic, no cheese on top. It is a 'di magro' dish, for the Catholic fasting days (Christmas Eve, Good Friday, the Redentore) and old osterie keep it on all year precisely because it was the dish of the occasions rather than of everyday.

• Baccalà mantecato

  In Venice baccalà is not salt cod: it is stockfish, cod dried in the air rather than preserved in salt, shipped from the Lofoten islands. It is soaked for days, boiled, and whipped into a cream with oil trickled in: no milk and no butter, which are other regions' additions. It is eaten on a slice of white polenta, standing at a bacaro counter, with a small glass of wine: a couple of euros a piece, and serious places make it themselves rather than buying it in five-kilo tubs.

Day 1

• Cannaregio district✦ hidden gem

  This is the sestiere where people still live: ten minutes from the station and a different planet from St Mark's. Here is the Ghetto, the first in Europe (the name comes from the geto, the foundry that stood on this island before the Republic confined the Jews here in 1516) and the houses are taller than anywhere else in the city because the only way to grow was upwards. The synagogues can only be seen on the museum's guided tour, not alone. In the evening the Fondamenta della Misericordia is where you drink at neighbourhood prices.

• Island of San Pietro di Castello✦ hidden gem

  The island at the city's eastern tip: the church was Venice's cathedral until 1807, before St Mark's, which was the doge's private chapel. The Istrian stone bell tower leans visibly. The campo in front is grass, with washing out and children playing, and there is not one souvenir shop: it is ten minutes on foot from the Biennale Gardens, it costs nothing, and it is the Venice nobody photographs because nobody knows it is there.

• Squero di San Trovaso✦ hidden gem

  One of the very few yards left where gondolas are genuinely built and repaired. It is not a museum and you do not go in: you look from the far bank of the rio, from fondamenta Nani, where there is conveniently a bacaro with tables outside. The wooden houses with sloping roofs around it are not Venetian but alpine: the boatwrights who came down from the Cadore with the timber built them, and they have stayed that way.

Day 2

• San Giorgio Maggiore and its bell tower✦ hidden gem

  Three minutes by vaporetto line 2 from San Zaccaria. Palladio's basilica is open every day from 9am to 6pm and entry is free; the chancel holds two large Tintorettos and a side chapel his final work, painted in the year he died. The bell tower (the one from which you photograph St Mark's Square whole, which the St Mark's campanile itself cannot do) is however temporarily closed for major maintenance: check it has reopened before crossing the basin.

• Scuola Grande di San Rocco✦ hidden gem

  Open every day from 9.30am to 5.30pm, ticket desk closing at 5pm, and shut only at Christmas, New Year and Easter. It holds over sixty paintings in the exact places they were commissioned for, nearly all by Tintoretto, who worked here for more than twenty years: it is the only one of the old Scuole Grandi to survive the fall of the Republic intact. At the entrance they hand out mirrors to carry. You genuinely need them: the major canvases are on the ceiling and craning upwards for an hour is a bad idea.

Day 1

• Sarde in saor

  Sardines fried and then marinated in stewed onions, vinegar, raisins and pine nuts. It is not a restaurant recipe but a shipboard preserve: the saor kept fish edible for weeks at sea, and the raisins were there to blunt the vinegar. Which is why it has to rest at least a day and is never eaten fresh from the pan. Order it as a cicchetto at the counter, one piece at a time, standing: at a table, as a dish, the same thing costs three times as much.

• Bigoli in salsa

  Thick, rough wheat pasta pushed through a hand press, dressed with salted anchovies or sardines melted slowly into onion: no tomato, no garlic, no cheese on top. It is a 'di magro' dish, for the Catholic fasting days (Christmas Eve, Good Friday, the Redentore) and old osterie keep it on all year precisely because it was the dish of the occasions rather than of everyday.

Day 2

• Baccalà mantecato

  In Venice baccalà is not salt cod: it is stockfish, cod dried in the air rather than preserved in salt, shipped from the Lofoten islands. It is soaked for days, boiled, and whipped into a cream with oil trickled in: no milk and no butter, which are other regions' additions. It is eaten on a slice of white polenta, standing at a bacaro counter, with a small glass of wine: a couple of euros a piece, and serious places make it themselves rather than buying it in five-kilo tubs.

• Rialto Bridge and Market

  The market runs on two different timetables and that is where people go wrong: the fish market, under the neo-Gothic loggia of 1907, opens Tuesday to Saturday from 7am to 2pm and is closed on Sundays and Mondays; the fruit and vegetable stalls, by contrast, work Monday to Saturday and keep going until evening. The bridge dates from 1591 and for almost three centuries was the only stone crossing of the Grand Canal: walking over is free, but the shops on it have been selling souvenirs for at least a century.