Dragon Child in from SF, Old Man down from London — meeting in Mestre by the station, with an early train north in the morning.
Two flights, one city. The Old Man comes down from London (after a few days in Dorsoduro), the Dragon Child lands from San Francisco on Saturday evening — and they converge at Marconi House in Mestre, on the mainland a few minutes from Venezia Mestre station and the airport.
It's a practical first night, not a late one: the train north leaves at 08:00. Grab a coffee by the station and go. The real Venice — cicchetti, bàcari, a row on the lagoon — is saved for the very end of the trip.
16 Via Sernaglia — a simple mainland base an ~8–10 min walk from Venezia Mestre station, ideal for the early train north.
Hotel site →Just coffee for now — there's an 08:00 train. The in-station bars open earliest (Puro Gusto from 05:00); Sunday closes a few places. The fun Venice waits for the end.
Venice (Venezia) is built on an archipelago of some 118 small islands in a shallow tidal lagoon at the head of the Adriatic, stitched together by hundreds of bridges. Settlement was driven by refuge: mainland Veneti fleeing Germanic and Hunnic invasions during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire retreated to the defensible marshes from the 5th to 7th centuries. By tradition the line of doges — the elected heads of state who would rule for over 1,100 years — began in 697 under nominal Byzantine authority.
In 828 Venetian merchants famously smuggled the relics of St Mark the Evangelist out of Alexandria, and the saint's winged lion became the emblem of the state. Over the medieval centuries Venice became the dominant maritime republic of the Mediterranean, its wealth built on the spice and luxury trade with Byzantium and the Levant; its merchant Marco Polo (1254–1324) journeyed to the court of Kublai Khan. The republic's title, the "Most Serene Republic" (La Serenissima), reflected an oligarchic constitution engineered to prevent any one family seizing power.
The turning point came with the Fourth Crusade: in 1204 the blind Doge Enrico Dandolo diverted it to sack Constantinople, carving out a commercial empire across Greece, Crete and the Aegean (the bronze horses of St Mark's were among the plunder). At its height in the 15th–16th centuries Venice controlled a Stato da Mar of overseas colonies; overreach on the mainland provoked the League of Cambrai (1508) and a crushing defeat at Agnadello in 1509. The thousand-year republic ended in May 1797, when Napoleon forced the last doge to abdicate.
The historic city is divided into six sestieri. Cannaregio, the populous northern district, holds the Venetian Ghetto — established by Senate decree in 1516, the first compulsory Jewish quarter in the world (geto, from a former foundry, is the likely root of the word "ghetto"). Dorsoduro, the high-ground sestiere along the Giudecca Canal, concentrates Venice's great art institutions: the Gallerie dell'Accademia and the domed votive Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, begun in 1631 in thanksgiving for the end of a plague. Venice and its lagoon have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 — and the classic gateway by rail into the Dolomites.