The right way to spend a day in Venice is not in a museum or a queue but on your feet with a glass in your hand. The Venetians have a word for it, the giro d'ombre, the round of shadows, and it is the closest thing the city has to an instruction manual. You walk from one small bar to the next, and at each one you take a glass of wine and something to eat, standing up, and then you move on. Begin where the food does, at the cluster of bars around the Rialto market, and begin before the lunch crowd finds them.
The glass is an ombra, which means shade. The Venetians will tell you the wine sellers once followed the shadow of the campanile across the square to keep their barrels cool, and whether or not that is true it is the word they still use for a small glass of house wine. With it you eat cicchetti, the little plates lined up along the counter: a crostino of whipped salt cod, baccala mantecato; a fried meatball, a polpetta; sarde in saor, sardines turned sweet and sour with onions and vinegar and raisins. There is one rule and it matters. Eat it standing at the bar. The moment you sit down, a cover charge lands on your bill and, worse, the walking stops.
The bars are the point, and the good ones sit within a few minutes of the market. All'Arco, a slot of a place in San Polo run by a father and son, buys its fish and vegetables from the stalls a few steps away and makes some of the best cicchetti in the city, so get there early because it shuts by the middle of the afternoon. Al Merca, on the market square itself, is not much more than a window with a crowd in front of it, pouring a glass and a small filled roll for the porters and fishmongers on their break. And Cantina Do Mori, which by its own reckoning has been pouring since 1462, is a dark low room hung with old copper where the sandwiches are the size of a postage stamp and the service is brisk to the edge of rude. None of the three has anywhere to sit, which is exactly as it should be.
To see how the whole machine works, go to the Rialto market when it opens, while the boats are still unloading and the fishmongers are laying the lagoon out on ice, sea bass and soft-shell crabs and things you could not name. This is the engine room. Everything the good bars will hand you at noon came off these stones in the morning, and the market has fed the city this way for something close to a thousand years. Stand out of the way of the trolleys and watch it for twenty minutes; it is the least touristed and most Venetian thing in the postcode.
Two practical notes, and no more. Arrive on the water, on the number one waterbus down the length of the Grand Canal rather than the sealed fast boat that hides it from you, because the slow ride past the palazzi is the best hour you will spend for the price of a ticket. And know that on its busiest days the city now charges day-trippers a few euros to come and go between morning and mid-afternoon; if you take a room and sleep here you do not pay it, and you also get the giro to yourself before the coaches arrive.
One word on the gondola, since you will wonder. The fare is fixed by the city, around ninety euros for half an hour by day and more once the lamps come on, it is unabashedly for visitors, and it bobs. Take one anyway, but not from the rank on the Grand Canal. Walk a few minutes to a quiet side canal, find a gondolier leaning on his oar with nothing to do, and let him row you through the back of the city where the water goes green and still and the only sound is the blade turning.
By late afternoon you will have crossed half of Venice on a route drawn entirely by which bar came next, San Polo to San Marco by way of a dozen counters, and it will have cost you less than one sit-down dinner near the Rialto Bridge. That is the giro d'ombre, and it is the most Venetian thing you can do without owning a boat. Order one more ombra at whatever counter you have washed up against, drink it standing, and call it a day properly spent.
