Venice tickets: prices, what to book ahead and where to buy them

There are a lot of Venice tickets, almost all of them cheap and almost all of them available on the spot. The difficulty is not the price: it is working out which three or four have to be locked in before you leave home, and which can be bought at the door without losing anything. This page lines up prices, timings and booking rules, so you can decide in ten minutes rather than over two evenings.

Prices marked "official" come from the box offices of the organisations that run each site; prices given as "from €" are the real starting prices in the Tiqets catalogue in September 2026.

The Venice tickets price table, attraction by attraction

The only four things to book before you travel

St Mark's Basilica. This is the one attraction in the city where booking is an obligation rather than advice: the ticket carries your name and a timed slot, and in the busy months the official slots run out weeks ahead. Turn up without one and you are forced to buy from a reseller, at prices starting from €24 instead of the official €10.

The Itinerari Segreti (Secret Itineraries tour) at the Doge's Palace. Small groups, fixed departures, three languages. The guided visit with skip-the-line entry starts at €40 and includes free access to the rest of the palace afterwards.

The Palazzo Pisani terrace. You go up only on a guided visit, at fixed times, in groups of 30. There is no last-minute alternative: 195 steps, no lift, and the best view in Venice after the Campanile.

Concerts and opera. Musica a Palazzo has a few dozen seats a night. The Vivaldi concerts have more availability, but seats are unallocated: you book the ticket, not the chair.

Everything else — civic museums, churches, smaller palaces, the water bus — can be bought on the day with no penalty.

Where each kind of ticket is actually sold

There is no single ticket office in Venice, and that explains most of the confusion.

The civic museums — Doge's Palace, Correr, Ca' Rezzonico, Ca' Pesaro, Fortuny, Mocenigo, Casa Goldoni, Natural History, Murano Glass, Burano Lace — belong to the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (the civic museums foundation) and are sold at visitmuve.it or at the desks. The Doge's Palace ticket is combined with three other sites on the square and cannot be split.

St Mark's Basilica belongs to the Procuratoria di San Marco and has its own ticket office, independent of everything else. The Pala d'Oro and the museum with the Loggia dei Cavalli are separate supplements.

The Campanile has yet another ticket office, at its entrance on the square.

The churches in the Chorus circuit — Chorus is the association that runs paid entry to sixteen Venetian churches — have a dedicated ticket, single or combined.

ACTV transport — ACTV being the city's public transport operator — is sold at the machines on the landing stages, at Venezia Unica points and online.

Online resellers — Tiqets, GetYourGuide, Musement and the others listed on the booking platforms page — do not replace any of these channels: they buy availability and resell it with a margin, in exchange for instant confirmation, a ticket on your phone and one interface covering attractions with different owners.

When the reseller costs more, and when it is still worth it

The margin is real and worth looking at squarely. The Campanile costs €10 at the ticket office and from €25 online. The Basilica costs €10 officially and from €24 with a host. On those two, the mark-up is well over 100%.

On others the gap is small or nothing: the Natural History Museum is €15 either way, so is the Glass Museum, and the Doge's Palace carries the same official €35 unless you book a month ahead.

The practical rule: buy from the official channel when you have time and availability exists; switch to a reseller when the official slots have gone, when you want a combo no public body is able to sell, or when you need instant confirmation a few hours before the visit.

Combos that put together attractions run by different organisations — the Doge's Palace with the Basilica, the Basilica with the Campanile, monuments with an island tour — exist only on the commercial market. The full comparison, with the arithmetic of when they genuinely save money, is on the passes and combos page.

Concessions, free entry and the cards that pay for themselves

The civic museums apply a concession rate to children aged 6–14, students aged 15–25, over-65s, Rolling Venice and ISIC holders, and Ministry of Culture staff. At the Doge's Palace that means €15 instead of €35; on the Museum Pass, €25 instead of €50.

Entry is free for under-6s, for residents and people born in the Comune of Venice, for disabled visitors with one companion, for licensed tour guides, for ICOM members and for MUVE Friend Card holders.

Anyone aged 6 to 29 should look at the Rolling Venice card: it costs a few euros, unlocks the concession rates at the civic museums and a discounted 72-hour ACTV pass. Over three days it pays for itself at the first museum.

One piece of free entry that many visitors assume and that does not exist here: the free museum Sundays run by the Italian Ministry of Culture do not apply to the Venetian civic museums, which belong to the city rather than the state.

Cancellation, validity and the ticket on your phone

Most Venetian tickets with a fixed date and time cannot be refunded or changed. That covers the Doge's Palace with fast-track entry, the Campanile and the St Mark's Square combos. Versions with free cancellation up to 24 hours before do exist, recognisable because they cost a few euros more: the Doge's Palace with a host at €37 instead of €35 is the clearest example.

Almost every ticket arrives as a QR code on your phone and is shown at the gate. Bring a power bank and take a screenshot: signal is patchy in the lanes and there is no coverage in the halls of the Doge's Palace.

The Museum Pass is valid for 6 months with one entry per museum; the themed packages for 3 months. Reseller tickets are valid for the date you choose, apart from open-date products such as Caribe Bay.

Before you buy anything: the access fee

There is one payment that is not a ticket and that no reseller can sell you. On the dates listed in the council calendar, anyone entering the historic city without staying the night has to pay the contributo di accesso (the Venice access fee): €5 booked four days ahead or €10 at the last minute, only on the council portal. It is independent of every ticket on this page and gets you into nothing except the city itself. The rules, the calendar and the exemptions are on the Venice access fee page.

With that checked, the right order for sorting out your Venice tickets is always the same: lock in the Basilica, decide whether the Doge's Palace is worth booking 30 days ahead for the official discount, add the two or three things from the table above that genuinely interest you, and leave the rest to the day. If you have not chosen what to see yet, start from things to do in Venice.