The First Thing You Notice Is the Silence
Venice in February is quieter than you’d expect. The summer tourist machinery has wound down, the cruise ships are elsewhere, and the city settles into something closer to its actual rhythm — stone and water and fog. Then Carnival arrives, and for 18 days the whole place tilts sideways.
The 2026 Carnevale di Venezia runs February 8 to 25. If you’ve seen photos of the elaborate costumes and thought it looked like a theme park, fair enough — from the outside it can read that way. But walking through it is different. There’s a strange tension between the city’s winter stillness and the sudden explosion of gilded masks and silk capes. It doesn’t feel like a performance you’re watching. It feels like you wandered into someone else’s dream.
What Actually Happens During Carnival
The headline event is the Volo dell’Angelo — the Flight of the Angel. Someone (usually the previous year’s costume contest winner, or sometimes a local celebrity) gets strapped to a cable and slides from the top of St. Mark’s bell tower down into the square. It sounds ridiculous written out like that, and honestly it kind of is, but watching it happen with ten thousand people craning their necks upward is genuinely thrilling.
The Best Masked Costume Contest is the other big draw. Contestants spend months — some spend the entire year — building their costumes by hand. We’re talking full 18th-century Venetian noble outfits with wigs, fans, jewelry, the works. The finals happen in Piazza San Marco over the last weekend. Getting a good viewing spot means arriving early.
Then there are the masked balls. Several historic palazzos host ticketed evening events with period music, dancing, and dinner. Tickets aren’t cheap — figure a few hundred euros minimum for the reputable ones. There’s a whole cottage industry of “Carnival ball” events of varying quality, so if you’re going to splurge, do some research on which palazzo and which organizer.
The rest of it is harder to pin down. Street performers materialize in random campos. A string quartet might be playing in a small square you stumbled into. Costumed figures pose silently on bridges for photos. It’s not so much a scheduled festival as an atmosphere that descends on the city.
The Mask Thing
You don’t need to show up in full costume. Most visitors wear a simple mask — you can buy one for a few euros from the stalls that appear everywhere during Carnival. The cheap ones are fine for the experience.
But if you want something real, head to the workshops in Dorsoduro or San Polo. Venetian mask-making is a genuine craft tradition, not just tourist tat. The artisans use papier-mâché built up in layers, then painted and gilded by hand. A proper handmade mask runs anywhere from €40 to several hundred depending on complexity. Ca’ Macana is one of the better-known workshops — they did the masks for the Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, which tells you something about the quality.
The different mask types have names and histories. The bauta — the white mask with the jutting chin — was designed so you could eat and drink without removing it. The medico della peste (plague doctor) with the long beak is the one everyone recognizes. Whether that beak was actually stuffed with herbs to ward off plague is one of those stories that might be embellished, but it’s a good story.
The Parts Nobody Romanticizes
Venice is small. Really small. The historic center is about 7 square kilometers, and during Carnival peak weekends, it can feel like every one of those kilometers has been filled with people. The narrow calli (alleyways) around San Marco become genuinely difficult to navigate — think shoulder-to-shoulder shuffling, not strolling.
February weather is cold and damp. Average temperatures sit around 3-8°C, and the humidity off the lagoon makes it feel colder. If you’re wearing a costume, layer underneath. If you’re just visiting, bring a proper winter coat and waterproof shoes. Venice floods sometimes in winter — acqua alta — and while the new MOSE barrier system has reduced the frequency, it still happens.
Food near San Marco during Carnival is expensive and often mediocre. The tourist-trap restaurants charge a coperto (cover charge) that can be €5-8 per person before you’ve ordered anything. This is standard in Venice but more aggressive in the tourist zones.
Wander into Cannaregio instead. The bacari (wine bars) there serve cicchetti — Venetian small plates — for a euro or two each. Baccalà mantecato (whipped salt cod) on bread, sarde in saor (sardines with sweet-sour onions), little meatballs. Stand at the bar, have a glass of prosecco, move to the next one. This is how Venetians actually eat.
Getting There and Staying Somewhere
Venice has two airports: Marco Polo (the main one, on the mainland) and Treviso (used by budget airlines, about 40km out). From Marco Polo, you can take the Alilaguna water bus directly into the city, which is the scenic option, or the bus to Piazzale Roma, which is faster.
Accommodation during Carnival books up months ahead and prices spike significantly. A hotel room in the historic center that might be €120 in November could be €300+ during Carnival. Two practical alternatives: stay in Mestre, the mainland district connected to Venice by a 10-minute train ride, where hotels are roughly half the price. Or book an apartment — Venice has a lot of rental stock, and having a kitchen saves money on the food front.
Trip.com tends to have a decent range of Venice hotels, including some of the Mestre options that don’t always show up on every platform. Worth comparing though — prices vary more than you’d think across different booking sites.
For flights into Venice from Asia, CheapOAir sometimes has routing through Middle Eastern hubs that’s cheaper than the direct European carriers, though you’ll spend longer in transit.
What to Do When You Need a Break
Carnival is intense, and after a day or two of crowds and costumes, you might want to step out of it for a bit. The good news is that Venice’s best museums are often less crowded during Carnival because everyone’s in San Marco.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal is one of Italy’s finest modern art museums — Pollocks, Picassos, and a beautiful sculpture garden. The Gallerie dell’Accademia has the Venetian old masters. Neither is ever truly empty, but during Carnival the crowds go to the piazza, not the galleries.
Or take a vaporetto to Burano. It’s about 40 minutes from Fondamente Nove, and the island is famous for its houses painted in absurdly vivid colors — electric blue, canary yellow, deep pink. It’s a working fishing village that happens to look like someone’s Instagram fantasy. The lace shops are mostly selling machine-made imports now, but the colors are real.
If you want to book a guided tour or a specific experience — a mask-making workshop, a glass-blowing demonstration on Murano, a food tour — GetYourGuide has a reasonable selection for Venice. The mask-making workshops in particular are worth doing; you spend a couple of hours learning the process and leave with something you actually made.
The Timing Question
The 18 days of Carnival aren’t all equally busy. The opening weekend (Feb 8-9) has the ceremonial events — the water parade on the Grand Canal, the official opening. The final weekend (Feb 22-25, culminating in Shrove Tuesday the 24th) is when everything peaks: the biggest costume contests, the most elaborate balls, the maximum density of costumed people in San Marco.
Midweek is the sweet spot if you want the atmosphere without the crush. Tuesday through Thursday you’ll still see plenty of masks and costumes, but you can actually walk at a normal pace and get into restaurants without a reservation.
One thing to be aware of: the big public events (Volo dell’Angelo, costume contest finals) happen on specific days, usually weekends. Check the official program once it’s published — the exact schedule tends to come out a few weeks before Carnival starts.
Leaving
The last night of Carnival has a kind of melancholy to it. The masks come off, the costumes get packed away, and Venice goes back to being its regular self — which, to be fair, is still one of the most extraordinary cities on earth. You just don’t get the permission to be someone else anymore.
On the train back to the airport, I noticed a woman still had gold face paint behind her ear that she’d missed when washing up. She was reading something on her phone and didn’t seem to notice. That felt about right — Carnival sticks to you a little, even after you think it’s over.
