The Doge's Palace — the Building Venice Put Up the Wrong Way Round

Reserved dated entry to the Doge's Palace, and admission to the three other St Mark's Square Museums: the Correr Museum, the National Archaeological Museum and the Monumental Rooms of the Marciana Library. The three sit together at the far end of Piazza San Marco from the palace and are entered through the Correr. The ticket is valid for one day.

No, and it is worth being clear about the difference. The Venice Museum Pass is a broader, more expensive ticket covering around a dozen civic museums across the city and islands, valid for six months. This is the St Mark's Square Museums ticket: the Doge's Palace plus the three museums in the square, valid for one day. If you are in Venice briefly and mainly want the palace, this is the right one.

You book for a specific date, and the listing describes it as reserved entry — check the booking screen for your date, as the operator has been tightening entry management in recent seasons. Either way the practical benefit is the same: you go to the reserved-entry line rather than the ticket office queue, which in high season is the difference between walking in and standing on the Piazzetta for an hour.

Two to three hours for the palace itself. The route is long, it runs one way with limited opportunity to double back, and the rooms are dense with things worth stopping for. If you also intend to use the other three museums on the same ticket, allow the better part of a day, or plan to do them on a separate visit within the ticket's validity.

An enclosed limestone bridge built around 1600, crossing the narrow Rio di Palazzo to link the palace with the New Prisons. The name is a nineteenth-century romantic invention, popularised by Byron, imagining prisoners sighing at their last glimpse of Venice through its stone-latticed windows. The visitor route crosses it in both directions, so you will walk through it — though the famous photograph of the bridge is taken from outside, from the Ponte della Paglia on the waterfront.

It is very widely described as the largest oil painting on canvas in the world, at roughly 22 metres by 7. It fills the wall behind the doge's throne in the Great Council chamber and contains several hundred figures. Whether some larger canvas exists somewhere is the sort of question that depends on definitions, but the scale of the thing in the room is not in doubt.

The standard route takes you across the Bridge of Sighs into the New Prisons, and you walk the cell corridors there. The Piombi — the cells under the lead roof of the palace itself, from which Casanova famously escaped in 1756 — are not on the standard route; they are covered by the separate Secret Itineraries guided tour, which must be booked as its own ticket.

The first hour after opening at nine, and the last two hours of the afternoon. Venice's day-visitor numbers peak between roughly eleven and three, and the palace fills accordingly. Winter weekdays are dramatically calmer than anything between May and September, and if you have any choice in the matter, a November morning is a completely different experience from an August lunchtime.

The palace stands on the Piazzetta, the open space between St Mark's Square and the lagoon. Venice has no cars, so you arrive on foot or by water. The nearest vaporetto stops are San Zaccaria and San Marco–Vallaresso, both a few minutes' walk. From the railway station or Piazzale Roma, Line 1 or Line 2 runs down the Grand Canal to St Mark's.

Much of the main route is reachable by lift and the museum publishes an accessible itinerary, but some historic sections — the Bridge of Sighs and the prison corridors in particular — involve steps and narrow passages that cannot be adapted. If you have specific access needs, check the museum's own current accessibility information for your date before booking, since the arrangements change with restoration work.