Doge's Palace prisons in Venice: tickets, opening hours and how to visit

The Doge's Palace prisons are not one place. The Palazzo Ducale holds three distinct sets of rooms, with three distinct tickets, and the confusion between them is why so many visitors leave St Mark's convinced they have seen Casanova's cell without ever going near it. This page sorts it out: what each ticket covers, what it costs, which one to choose.

The three Venetian prisons, in one table

The first three sit inside the civic museum circuit. The fourth is an independent visit that enters the same building from the opposite side, the one on the waterfront, and needs no Doge's Palace ticket at all.

Doge's Palace prisons tickets compared

The Doge's Palace ticket, from €35, is the default choice. It covers the institutional route — the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the Sala dello Scrutinio, the ducal apartments — the walk through the Bridge of Sighs and the descent into the New Prisons, where you walk the corridors between the cells. At the official box office the full ticket is €35, the concession €15, and anyone buying at least thirty days ahead on the civic museums site pays €30. On Tiqets, Doge's Palace: Fast Track Entry starts at €35 and is rated 4.6 out of 5 from 8,751 reviews.

The Itinerari Segreti (Secret Itineraries tour), from €40, is the only way to see the Piombi. The guided visit runs through the offices of the secret chancellery, the torture room and the cells under the roof, the ones Casanova escaped from. It lasts about an hour, after which you are free to walk the palace on the same ticket. Five euros more than plain entry for the one section no other ticket gives you: if the prisons are the reason you came to St Mark's, this is the correct choice. Doge's Palace: Secret Itinerary Guided Tour + Skip The Line is rated 4.5 out of 5 from 564 reviews.

The Palazzo delle Prigioni, from €9.90, is the cheap and specific visit. You go in from the Riva degli Schiavoni and see the courtroom where the Republic tried its minor offences, the isolation cells, the prisoners' graffiti and the room of torture instruments. It takes about 45 minutes, with a live guide in Italian or English, or an audio guide in Italian, English, French and Spanish. St. Mark's Square Prison Palace: Entry Ticket is rated 4.0 from 147 reviews: it satisfies people who want a story, and disappoints anyone expecting a structured museum.

If you are weighing up other museums in the city as well, the Museum Pass and the other formats deserve a look: the Doge's Palace is included, the Palazzo delle Prigioni is not.

What you see: New Prisons, Pozzi, Piombi

The New Prisons

Work on the Palazzo delle Prigioni began in 1563 to a design by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi and was carried forward by Antonio da Ponte, the architect of the Rialto bridge, with the Istrian stone façade on the waterfront finished towards the end of the sixteenth century. For its time the building was advanced: dry, ventilated cells with windows and sanitation, meant to replace the unhealthy cells carved out inside the Doge's Palace.

The museum route arrives here after the rooms of state, by way of the Bridge of Sighs. It is a covered passage with two parallel corridors and small barred windows: the two openings through which a condemned man saw the lagoon for the last time. The name is nineteenth-century and is usually credited to Lord Byron, not to the Republic.

The Pozzi

These are the ground-floor cells of the Doge's Palace, below water level: dark, cold, windowless. They held common criminals and anyone who could not pay their way out. They are covered by the standard ticket and come near the end of the route, when most visitors are tired and move through quickly. Slow down: this is the part that lands hardest.

The Piombi

The cells under the lead-sheet roof, which is where the name comes from. Small, timber-lined, unbearably hot in summer and freezing in winter. They were kept for political prisoners and for anyone whose rank had to be protected. Giacomo Casanova was locked up here in 1755 on a charge of impiety and escaped on the night of 31 October to 1 November 1756 by way of the roof. His is the only documented escape from the Piombi, and he told it himself in Histoire de ma fuite.

The Piombi are not part of the standard route. To see them you need the guided itinerary.

When to go

Doge's Palace: go in at opening or after 16:00. The 11:00–14:00 stretch belongs to the groups arriving off cruise ships and coaches, and in the narrow corridors of the New Prisons the difference is felt far more sharply than in the state rooms.

Palazzo delle Prigioni: open 11:00–18:00, last entry 17:00. The 11:00 visit is the quietest; by late afternoon the Riva degli Schiavoni is saturated and the flow through the door picks up.

Season: from November to February the prisons are the part of the palace that suffers least in low season, because they are naturally cold and dark anyway. In summer the reverse applies, and the Piombi turn into an oven for visitors too: the 9:30 Itinerari Segreti are markedly more bearable than the midday ones.

Acqua alta: with a high tide, the ground floor of the Doge's Palace and the Pozzi may be closed or reachable only over the raised gangways. Acqua alta is the tidal flooding that hits Venice in autumn and winter; check the forecast the evening before on the Venice council's tide centre site.

The smart way in

Two things that genuinely work.

Go into the Doge's Palace by the Porta del Frumento, on the piazzetta side facing the water, rather than the basilica side. It is the official visitor entrance, and the queue can be read at a glance from the waterfront, so you know in advance how long you are in for.

If the queue is long and your time is short, reverse the order. Do the Palazzo delle Prigioni at €9.90 first — it is ninety seconds' walk beyond the Ponte della Paglia and has almost no wait — and come back to the Doge's Palace in the late afternoon. You see the prisons either way, and you take the palace once it has emptied.

How to save money

• The €15 Doge's Palace concession covers 6–14s, students aged 15–25, over-65s and Rolling Venice and ISIC card holders. The Itinerari Segreti have a €20 concession.
• Buying early on the official site: at least thirty days ahead on palazzoducale.visitmuve.it brings the full ticket down to €30. It is the lowest fare available for the complete route, but it needs a fixed date and cannot be cancelled with the flexibility of a commercial online booking.
• The €50 Museum Pass includes the Doge's Palace and the civic museums, and pays off from the third entry onwards.
• Free at the Doge's Palace: residents of and people born in the Comune di Venezia, children under 6, disabled visitors with a carer, ICOM members.
• The Palazzo delle Prigioni at €9.90 is the lowest paid entry of any kind around St Mark's. If the budget is tight and the prisons are what interests you, it is the rational choice.

The mistake that costs money: buying the Itinerari Segreti ticket in the belief that it replaces ordinary entry, then discovering it was the other way round — or paying twice for the same route because the product name does not make clear what is inside it. Always read the line about the prisons in the list of what is included.

On the days marked in the council's calendar, day visitors not staying overnight also owe the city access fee. It is a separate tax, paid only at https://cda.ve.it, and no ticket reseller can collect it on the council's behalf.

Getting there

Palazzo delle Prigioni: San Marco 4209, Riva degli Schiavoni, at the foot of the Ponte della Paglia. From the piazzetta, walk east along the waterfront, cross the bridge everyone photographs the Bridge of Sighs from, and the entrance is immediately on your left.

Doge's Palace: San Marco 1, entrance at the Porta del Frumento on the waterfront side.

By vaporetto: the San Zaccaria stop (lines 1, 2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2), two minutes' walk west, or San Marco-Vallaresso (lines 1 and 2), five minutes east. The vaporetto is the city's public water bus, run by ACTV; travel passes start at €12 on Tiqets and the options are compared on the vaporetto and ACTV page.

On foot: 12 minutes from Rialto, about 40 from Santa Lucia station. Anything on wheels is a problem here — the Ponte della Paglia has steps on both sides — so leave suitcases at a luggage store before you come.

What's nearby

• St Mark's Basilica, three minutes: entry starts at €24 and the queue builds before 10:00.
• Ponte della Paglia, right outside the entrance: the vantage point for the Bridge of Sighs. Come at dawn if you want the photograph without sixty people in front of you.
• Museo Storico Navale, ten minutes towards the Arsenale: five floors of maritime history and the submarine Enrico Dandolo, which you can go inside.
• Chiesa di San Zaccaria, five minutes: Giovanni Bellini's altarpiece is worth the detour and the nave is free to enter.
• Palazzo Zaguri, on Campo San Maurizio: home to the Casanova museum, with a guided visit and a virtual reality section.

The Doge's Palace prisons remain the sharpest counterpoint to the gilded rooms of the Serenissima: you go from the Sala del Maggior Consiglio to a cell two metres by three in under five minutes of walking, and that contrast is precisely what Venetian architecture was built to make you feel.