A reader, not a ticket desk.
Twelve historic places in Venice — written for people who want context, not coupons.
What this is
Canal Courtyards is a small, independent editorial project. It collects twelve of the historic places that matter most in the lagoon city — palaces, churches, museums, monuments and lagoon islands — and writes a short essay about each.
Each entry is structured the same way: a few hundred words on the building's history, three highlights worth slowing down for, and a small block of practical detail — address, hours, how to get there. We don't sell tickets. We don't run tours. We don't take affiliate commissions.
The aim is to be the kind of reading you'd do on a slow vaporetto out to Burano, not the kind of website you'd consult standing in a queue.
Why twelve
Twelve is a useful number for Venice. It's the size of the original list of sestieri the Republic was divided into; it's the number of months in the calendar for someone who wants to read one entry a month; it's small enough that we can be honest about what made the cut and what didn't.
The list is opinionated. It leaves out the obvious tourist stops that have nothing left to say (the Bridge of Sighs as a viewing platform; Murano as a glass shopping mall) and includes things — the Arsenale walls, the back canals of Burano, the Mocenigo perfume rooms — that almost no day-trip itinerary will mention.
How it is made
Static HTML, hand-written CSS, no tracking beyond what tells us a page was read. The photographs are commissioned. The text is written, edited and revised in plain prose by a single editor who has lived part-time in Venice since 2018.
We update entries when something changes — opening hours, restoration closures, a new wing — and date the change at the bottom of each page when we do.
