How to Make the Most of the Venice Film Festival, According to a Critic Who Goes Every Year

When one thinks of the Venice Film Festival, a few indelible, almost impossibly exotic images spring to mind. The most recent may be Lady Gaga with her legs coyly crossed over the side of a water taxi as she announced her arrival to town for the premiere of A Star Is Born. (Or, I suppose, Harry Styles maybe spitting on his Don’t Worry Darling co-star Chris Pine.) But there has been a wealth of such moments for many decades: Venice is the oldest event of its kind, first held in 1932 and running near continuously since then—minus a few gaps during the Second World War and during some severe political strife that rocked Italy in the 1970s.

The festival’s origins are, well, not great: it was founded by fascists loyal to Mussolini and, eventually, Axis powers. But in the many decades since, the festival has evolved into one of the so-called “Big Three” festivals of Europe, alongside winter’s Berlin Film Festival and the mid-spring glitz and madness of Cannes. It is a premier showcase for art-house international fare and, on a good year, glossy Oscar bait sent across the Atlantic by American studios debuting their latest prestige fare.

Compared to Cannes, Venice is more relaxed—its screening schedule not so densely packed, its staff not quite as snooty, its dress codes more lax. The climate may often be punishing—high temperatures in baking sun, 100% humidity, mosquitoes suddenly filling the air at dusk—but Venice is nonetheless regarded by many people on the festival circuit as the jewel in the crown, one of high programming quality and easy glamour.

Lido v. San Marco: The Eternal War

It’s not hard to be glamorous when your event is held in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, that floating tangle of red buildings and snaking canals. Well, that’s where a lot of the nighttime events are, anyway. All of the screenings, meanwhile, are held on the Lido, a barrier island dotted with low-key beach clubs (and one decidedly high-key one, at the ritzy Excelsior Hotel, where cabanas can go for hundreds of Euros per day). A small town center with a few restaurants and lots of retirees is home to the festival headquarters. Some people—industry professionals, veteran critics, publicists, and awards strategists—are near-religiously committed to staying on the Lido, where you can walk (or bike, or e-scooter) to screenings without having to deal with the vaporetti, the lurching water buses that ferry people around Venice’s many islands.

Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido

Me, I figure that if I’m going to be in Venice, I want to be in actual Venice. In the years that I’ve been going to the festival (as the chief critic of Vanity Fair until last year), I’ve always stayed on San Marco island, the center of the city’s tourism industry and the host of its most iconic images: the eponymous Piazza with its tall brick tower and ornate palace, the Bridge of Sighs, that cute gondolier you keep seeing as he poles his boat under the Rialto Bridge. Traveling between San Marco and the Lido is one of the more grumbled-about aspects of the festival, though I’ve mostly found it easy enough over the years. One simply hops on the number 20 vaporetto at San Zaccaria (just a tiny bit south and east of Piazza San Marco) and, maybe 20 minutes later, the boat drops you off on the festival grounds. Lines can get long if you don’t time things right—a crush of people all trying to make the same movie in 45 minutes can be a harrowing mess—but if you give yourself a wider berth, the boats are calm and manageable and then you can while away your extra time on the Lido by having a bite at one of the festival’s snack bars or a drink on the charming terrace of the old-school Albergo Quattro Fontane, right across the street. (Hopefully in the shade; again, that sun is brutal.)

Carb City

Staying on San Marco can be way less expensive, due to the abundance of hotels and rental apartments, and it affords you far more opportunities to eat not only well but also surprisingly diversely. Seafood, pasta, and pizza still dominate most menus, but there are other kinds of cuisines to be found, like Chinese and Indian and North African—I even had a complex vegan tasting menu at the highly rated Bistro de Venise, located in a tiny alleyway off of an only slightly less narrow street that leads pilgrims on the well-trod path between the Rialto and Piazza San Marco.

If one is busy covering the festival, one may not always have time for a long sit-down meal, preferring instead to grab a few cicchetti (little tapas-like crostinis that are a staple of Venetian cuisine) or a sandwich. The best place that I’ve found to do the latter is L’ Bacaro de’ Bischeri, tucked into one of the market stalls right across from the Rialto, on the island of San Polo. The most popular item on the large menu seems to be the Don’t Tell William, two massive squares of focaccia with a generous heaping of stracciatella, mortadella, and pistachios piled in between. Eat it on the street outside, or do what I did and take it back to your little garret apartment in Campo San Luca (right near the H&M!) so no one will see you make a mess.

But if you do want to sit down, one classic option is Al Covo, just to the east of San Zaccaria, in a slightly quieter neighborhood. It’s a Michelin-recommended, seafood-heavy favorite among festivalgoers looking for a more elevated but affordable meal than they might get on the Lido. I know several journalists who make a point of going there every year, and have been doing so for decades. If you want something fancier, that’s both old and new, the Four Seasons has just reopened the iconic Hotel Danieli after a years-long remodel, and you can enjoy a posh lunch or dinner on the well-shaded fifth-floor terrace overlooking the lagoon. Just be careful that when you order the pinot grigio, the waiter knows you don’t mean the glass that costs €80. I made that unfortunately delicious mistake this year, on a placid afternoon when I’d had enough movies for the day.

But again, most people attending the film festival have little time for such a luxury. It’s mostly foraging for food between screenings and writing assignments, scarfing down that same sandwich over and over again, or darting back to your apartment to eat the groceries you bought at Supermercato Punto, a nearly American-sized market that also has a lovely little cocktail bar off to one side. (Where I stopped before my big shop to enjoy my go-to Venice drink, a Cynar spritz, on the tiny balcony perched over a canal.)

Where to Party If You Can Get In, or If You Can’t

There is certainly elegant fun to be had, though, if you knock on the right doors. (Or email the right publicists.) American studios often hold pre-premiere parties in the garden of the Excelsior, steps away from the Pala Grande, where celebrities walk the red carpet and scores of onlookers—from matinee idol-crazed teens to elderly looky-loos—gather to gawp and take pictures. This year, I journeyed to the Excelsior garden to brush shoulders with Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin McDonagh, who has followed up his lauded film The Banshees of Inisherin with a dark comedy about CIA spooks called Wild Horse Nine. His life partner, the actor and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame, was with him, as were several members of his cast, including Steve Buscemi, who looked perhaps a little perplexed to be there among the Euro swells and various influencer-type hangers-on.

Those afternoon events are brief amuse-bouches compared to what comes later in the evening, when Italian and French fashion houses flex their resources and throw exclusive dinners or parties at palazzos around the city, or at revered Grand Canal-side hotels like the Gritti Palace and the St. Regis. At the former, two friends convinced hotel security to let me into the tail end of a dinner for Cartier, where I sat a stone’s throw from a pleased-looking Orlando Bloom in the hotel’s lavishly appointed bar and chatted with Kate Mara about the wild, weird Bucking Fastard, the Werner Herzog movie that she and her sister, Rooney, debuted at the festival.

At the St. Regis, on another night, I sat one couch over from Robert Pattinson, who seemed relaxed and no doubt happy with the rave reviews for his award-worthy performance in A24’s big Venice premiere Primetime, in which Pattinson plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. The party was jam-packed and the bar lines were long, but one barely minds such things when one has a view of the canal and of Edward Cullen himself, dapper in a white dinner jacket.

That said, Venice is not quite the party-hopping, champagne-guzzling bacchanal that Cannes tends to devolve into. It’s a more restrained affair, partly because the city of Venice shuts down pretty early—unless, of course, a local points you in the direction of the good late-night spots. At least one of those places, one that’s a staple of many attendees’ film festival experience, is easy to find on your own: Ai Do Leoni, a compact and jovial bar right off of Piazza San Marco that stays open until 1:30, friends and potential lovers and a few awkward critics spilling out into the square (or, near the square) to talk and carouse and flirt while the rest of the city goes to sleep. You’ll be hungover on a boat the next day, but hey, you’re still in Venice.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler