The Cheapest Place to Stay in Italy? (And Some Other Ways to Do Venice on a Budget)

When it comes to Venice, if you don’t have a spare kidney to sell or, at least a spare infant to people-traffic, you’re unlikely to be staying in Venice proper, especially not during the August high season.

So, given our agenda for Venice included a trip to Harry’s Bar, regional wines, gallons of Spritz and plateloads of cicheti, we found ourselves in what I firmly believe to be the cheapest place to stay in Italy, the deliciously named Camping Jolly.

And, at under 20 euros a night for the two of us, with a pool, this is what I call a steal.

Camping should, of course, in theory, be a highly cost-effective way to travel. In practice, however, since it usually requires a tent, sleeping bags and a vehicle in which to transport yourself and said paraphernalia to the campsite – or fronting up thousands of euros on a campervan plus insurance and gas – it usually isn’t.

The beauty of Camping Jolly is that it comes with tents. And, not only that, the tents come with electricity, beds and bedding – and they’re lockable. They’re pretty much like mini-cottages, with one bunk and a single.

Mini-cottages packed like sardines, mind you. But mini-cottages, all the same.

And this particular Camping Jolly – there’s a chain of them, with branches in Florence and Rome – has not only a pool, but a pool with a giant orca. Which is easily sufficient to compensate for Zac’s utter contempt for the onsite discoteca, a form of entertainment for which he is around four years too young and I am at least ten years too old.

That’s not to say we exactly economised in Venice. My “budget” for Italy ran roughly as follows – “If we can keep under 50 euros a night for accommodation, then we can have one spendy meal a day and see the stuff we want to see.” (Even in August, using late bookings on Agoda and laterooms.com, we stayed in decent, en suite rooms for under 50 euros every night we weren’t camping.)

But, in actual fact, Venice doesn’t have to be as eye-bleedingly expensive as you’d believe.

Provided you stick to the back streets, Venice is one of the world’s best cities for walking around – Peggy Guggenheim once observed that you can get from any point in Venice to any other point in Venice in no more than twenty minutes. And most islands can be accessed by bridge.

A 24-hour pass for the vaporetti waterbuses costs something obscene like 35 euros – but a single ride on vaporetto number one, which takes you all the way down the Grand Canal in considerable style, runs a mere seven euros.

Zac had as little desire to ride a gondola as I did, which was nice, though if we had we’d likely have gone for the stand-up ferry gondolas called traghetti which cost a couple of euros a pop.

Rather than drop six euros a pop on espressos on Saint Mark’s Square, we opted for spendy event eating at fabulous places or snacks in back street and back square cafe bars.

And rather than invest in a card that bought us entry to a tonne of attractions, we picked the non-food places we wanted to go – the Accademia, the Guggenheim, Saint Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace – and did just those few places.

It was, frankly, absolutely splendid. And, yes, the food rocked, too…