If you ask me for my favorite panorama spots in Venice I’d immediately tell you that one of them is the clocktower of San Giorgio Maggiore (the second, after the clock tower of Saint Mark, by height).
Why, you’re asking? Well,
- The admission fee is way cheaper than for the Campanile di San Marco (€5 instead of €10).
- You have a stunning few over the Saint Mark’s Square and Venice (comparable to the famous map of Jacopo de‘ Barbari sold everywhere in the city)
- No queues.
- You shouldn’t miss San Giorgio Maggiore.
Once, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore was called the island of cypresses (Isola dei Cipressi); a „green lung“ in the heart of Venice, just a stone’s throw away from the „Europe’s most elegant living room“ (Napoleon), covered with cypresses, vines and beds, beneath a mill of the doge’s property.
An idyllic piece of earth that changed it’s owner in 982 when the doge Tribuno Memmo gave it to Giovanni Morosini with the intention to build a Benedictine monastery. Most of the buildings you can see today were created between the 15th and the 17th century; one of the famous names who had their part in it is the architect Andrea Palladio who was, amongst others, charged with the construction of the church San Giorgio Maggiore.
Other panorama points in Venice:
- Campanile di San Marco
- Skyline Bar – Hilton Molino Stucky
- Palazzo Contarini dal Bòvolo
