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15 Things to do in Venice! ☼ Family Travel in Italy

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Venice doesn’t have to drain a family’s travel budget to feel like a fairy tale.

Me Ra Koh and Brian, the husband-and-wife team behind the YouTube channel Adventure Family, spend their episode “15 Things to do in Venice! ☼ Family Travel in Italy” doing what they do best: turning a bucket-list destination into a doable itinerary for parents traveling with kids. Rather than another highlight reel of gondolas and gelato, the couple breaks down the actual logistics — what a ride costs, where to stand for a decent photo, and how to eat well without booking a table at every stop.

• Adventure Family contrasts a standard private gondola ride, priced around €75, with the traghetto — a shared gondola ferry that crosses the Grand Canal for as little as 75 cents.
• The episode features a family-friendly cicchetti tour, sampling Venice’s traditional small-plates bar food as a way to experience local cuisine without a sit-down dinner.
• Me Ra Koh walks through photography techniques for shooting the Grand Canal at night from the Rialto Bridge and for capturing color-saturated street scenes on Burano, reached by ferry from Venice.

The Gondola Math

Every visitor to Venice eventually faces the same decision at the edge of a canal: pay for the postcard moment or find the local workaround. Adventure Family lays out both sides plainly. A traditional gondola ride booked through one of the city’s stands runs roughly €75, a fixed-rate experience aimed squarely at tourists who want the serenaded, standing-gondolier version of Venice.

The traghetto is the other option, and it’s the one locals actually use. For about 75 cents, riders pack onto a stripped-down gondola that shuttles straight across the Grand Canal at a handful of fixed crossing points, no narration included. Brian and Me Ra Koh frame it as the practical way for a family to say they’ve ridden in a gondola without committing €75 per person to do it.

Eating Like Venetians: The Cicchetti Tour

Rather than one big restaurant meal, the family opts for a cicchetti tour — hopping between traditional Venetian bars for small plates, the Venetian answer to tapas. It’s a format built for families with kids who won’t sit still through a three-course dinner, letting everyone graze, compare bites, and move on to the next spot along the calli.

A €75 private gondola or a 75-cent traghetto crossing — Adventure Family says the ride is the same water, just a very different price tag.

Shooting Venice After Dark

Me Ra Koh, whose background is in photography, uses the Rialto Bridge as the anchor for the video’s nighttime shooting segment. The bridge’s elevated vantage over the Grand Canal makes it one of the few spots in the city where a family can frame the illuminated palazzos, the vaporetto traffic, and the water reflections all in a single long-exposure shot.

The advice extends past just Venice proper. On a ferry excursion to Burano, the small lagoon island famous for its saturated, candy-colored houses, the couple shifts to daytime street photography — composing shots that lean into the color blocking of the buildings against canal-side laundry lines and small footbridges.

A Practical Family Itinerary

What ties the fifteen stops together is the same throughline: Venice rewards visitors who plan around its quirks — water transport instead of taxis, small-plates grazing instead of formal dinners, and photography timed to light rather than convenience. Families weighing a similar Italy itinerary can find a complementary local perspective in this guide to Venice from the locals’ point of view, and those extending the trip down the coast may want to check whether Positano lives up to the hype before adding it to the route.

For a channel built around make-it-work family logistics, the traghetto tip is the one worth remembering next time Venice is on the itinerary — 75 cents gets the same canal, the same gondola shape, and none of the €75 markup for the serenade.