Venice in 3D: Follow the Grand Canal on Your iPhone

A city built on wooden piles in a lagoon, with only four bridges over its main channel and a famous square that floods before anywhere else. Here is how to explore all of it in full 3D with live Street View, right from your iPhone.

Venice stands on a scatter of small islands in a shallow lagoon at the head of the Adriatic, in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy. It was founded by mainlanders retreating from invasion into water too shallow for warships and too treacherous without local knowledge, and it grew from that refuge into a maritime republic that lasted a thousand years. The palaces along its main channel were built by merchants facing the water, because the water was the road.

The difficulty is that everyone knows this. Venice takes in more visitors than a city its size can absorb, rooms in the historic centre are punishing, the summer crowds move in slow currents through lanes built for two abreast, and the city has begun charging day visitors an access fee on its busiest dates. Add the flight and the season and it slides onto the list of places you will get to eventually.

You can start now. Venice can be explored in full 3D with live Street View, from your phone, without a ticket or a queue.

What makes Venice special

The Grand Canal is the spine. It curves through the middle of the city in a long reversed S, with three of the six historic districts on each bank, and along both stand the façades of families who wanted to be seen: Byzantine arcades, Gothic tracery, sober Renaissance stone, all leaning slightly and all with front doors at water level.

Only four bridges cross it. The Rialto, in white stone with shops built into its span, replaced a succession of wooden crossings in the late sixteenth century and is still the busiest point in the city. The Accademia and the Scalzi carry foot traffic further along, and a fourth, modern and glassy, links the bus terminal to the station. Everywhere else you cross by boat or walk the long way round.

At the seaward end sits Piazza San Marco. The basilica is a Byzantine building in an Italian city — five domes and a gold mosaic interior assembled over centuries from spoils brought home by Venetian ships. Beside it the campanile stands alone in the square, though the tower you see is a rebuild, raised after the original collapsed in 1902. Behind, the Doge's Palace opens onto the water, and a covered bridge crosses a side canal to the old prisons: the Bridge of Sighs, named long after anyone was led across it.

How to explore Venice in 3D

This is where MAPAS comes in. Instead of a flat map that hides which alley ends at a canal, you get Venice in real 3D, with live Street View you can walk.

Tilt the map and the roofscape emerges: tile, chimney pots, and the campanili Venetians have always used to navigate. Drop into Street View and follow the calli, cross the bridges, come out into a square you did not expect. The city turns under your finger.

For a first run, try this order:

1. Search for Venice, Italy and switch to 3D so the islands and the lagoon separate from the mainland.
2. Trace the Grand Canal from the railway station to the basin, watching the S curve and its four crossings appear.
3. Drop into live Street View at the Rialto, cross the bridge, then work south toward Piazza San Marco.
4. Circle the campanile and the basilica from above to see how the domes sit behind the façade.
5. Leave the centre: follow the Zattere along Dorsoduro, then move north to Cannaregio and the quiet canals of the Ghetto.
6. Turn on GPS navigation so the route is already in your hand the day you arrive.

Beyond Piazza San Marco

• Rialto market — produce and fish stalls that have supplied the city for centuries, busy early and shut by lunch.
• Dorsoduro and the Zattere — a long sunlit quay facing Giudecca, with the Salute church at its tip.
• Cannaregio and the Ghetto — the world's first ghetto, established in 1516, and the calmest walking in the city.
• Burano — a lagoon island of painted fishermen's houses and lacemaking, out toward the northern shallows.
• Torcello — the lagoon's oldest settlement, now nearly empty, with a cathedral full of mosaics.

Water, tides and the season the city floods

A photograph tells you nothing about height, and height is the whole story here. The city sits barely above the lagoon on wooden piles driven into the mud, and Piazza San Marco is among its lowest points, which is why it goes under first. Through autumn and winter, high tides pushed by southerly winds bring acqua alta; mobile barriers at the lagoon mouths are now raised against the worst of it, but duckboards still appear in the square on some mornings.

The 3D view also makes sense of the plan. Seen from above, the canals are not decoration but the street network, and the walking lanes are the gaps left between buildings. Distances that look short turn out to involve three bridges and a detour, while the impossible-looking ones are a single short crossing.

Before you go

Spring and autumn give the best light and the mildest air. Summer is hot, still and thick with crowds. Winter is quiet and often beautiful in fog, at the cost of short days and the risk of flooding. Carnival fills the city in the weeks before Lent.

Check the day-visitor access rules before you travel; they apply only on certain dates and change from season to season. Cover shoulders and knees for the basilica. Do not eat on monument steps or swim in the canals; both carry fines. And keep right in narrow lanes; residents are trying to get to work.

Common questions

Can I see the small canals in Street View?

Coverage is strongest along the walkable calli, campi and bridges, which is most of Venice, since the city is almost entirely pedestrian. The canals themselves appear from the bridges and quays that cross them.

How many days does Venice need?

Two days covers San Marco, the Rialto and one quiet district. Four lets you add the lagoon islands and the early and late hours, after the day crowds have gone.

Is MAPAS free to use?

Yes. It is free on the App Store, needs no sign-up before you start exploring, and works on iPhone and iPad.

No boat, no ticket, no crowd on the Rialto. Just Venice, in three dimensions, whenever you feel like getting lost in it.

Open MAPAS and follow the Grand Canal in 3D.