Venice is exhausted, and so are you after fighting through it. These canal towns, lagoon cities and Adriatic harbours give you the architecture without the entrance fee.
Venice now charges day-trippers to enter, has banned large cruise ships from the central lagoon, and still receives roughly 30 million visitors a year against a resident population of about 50,000. The arithmetic is grim and the experience reflects it. The good news is that the rest of the upper Adriatic, plus a few cities further inland, were shaped by the same Venetian Republic and inherit a lot of the same look.
Cities the Venetians built
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Ljubljana sits on a small river with bridges by Jože Plečnik, has a hilltop castle, and a car-free old town that you can walk in 20 minutes. It looks faintly Venetian because for a long time it answered to the same trading networks. The food market by Plečnik's colonnade still runs six days a week.
Trieste, Italy
An hour east of Venice by train and culturally another country. Piazza Unità d'Italia opens straight onto the sea, the cafes still serve the same espresso blends Joyce drank between writing sessions, and the karst plateau above the city has Roman ruins almost no one visits.
Piran, Slovenia
The most obvious Venetian fingerprint on the Slovenian coast. Tartini Square is shaped like the back of a former harbour, the cathedral campanile is a smaller cousin of San Marco's, and you can walk the whole peninsula in 15 minutes.
Rovinj, Croatia
Istrian Venice, more or less. The old town pushes out into the sea on its own little peninsula, the church of St. Euphemia sits at the top, and the lanes below are arranged for shade rather than tourist throughput.
Italian canal cities that aren't Venice
Chioggia
Chioggia is in the same lagoon as Venice, 25 km south, and sometimes called Little Venice by people who haven't actually been to it. It has canals, fish markets, working boats, and almost no foreign visitors. It is what Venice used to feel like at 7 a.m.
Treviso
Twenty minutes by train inland from Venice and full of smaller canals, weeping willows over running water, and the original Tiramisu (the dessert was invented at Le Beccherie in 1972). The Saturday market under the arcades is one of the best in the Veneto.
Comacchio
Down in Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Delta. Three connected bridges over a single canal junction, eel fishing traditions, and a regional park full of pink flamingos that wintered here long before Instagram noticed.
Mantua
Surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes built in the 12th century. The Gonzaga palaces, especially the Palazzo Te frescoes by Giulio Romano, hold up to anything in Venice and you can usually have a room to yourself.
When the look matters more than the geography
Bruges and Ghent
Flemish merchant cities with canal frontages and bell towers. Ghent in particular is now the smarter pick because Bruges has its own crowd problem on summer weekends.
Annecy, France
An Alpine town with three canals running through the old centre and a lake clean enough to swim across by the end of June.
Colmar, France
Half-timbered, on a small canal network locals call Little Venice. More on Colmar in our piece on alternatives to Paris.
If you must go to Venice
Stay overnight, walk Cannaregio or Castello rather than San Marco, and aim for November. The city in fog, with the acqua alta boots laid out at every hotel, is the one most travellers never see and is the version worth the trip.
