Venice

For seven months of every year the whole island is a group exhibition, and the best pavilions are the ones with no sign on the door.

Venice invented the international art exhibition in 1895 and has never let go of it. The biennale now occupies two permanent sites, roughly thirty palazzi rented for the season and a shifting constellation of collateral events that nobody has ever counted precisely. For those months the city works as a single exhibition with a street plan instead of a floor plan, and getting lost is a legitimate method.

Outside the biennale, the permanent holdings are extraordinary and oddly under-visited. Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi show the Pinault collection in buildings by Tadao Ando, the Accademia holds the Venetian Renaissance in rooms most tour groups skip, and the Peggy Guggenheim collection sits in an unfinished palace with a sculpture garden and a view across the canal.

The costs are real: the vaporetto is expensive, the restaurants near San Marco are a trap and the city charges day visitors for entry in high season. The answer is to stay overnight, walk everywhere, eat in Cannaregio and treat the water bus as a sightseeing tool rather than transport.