Italy certainly is the home of fine ice cream, and that’s no less true in Venice. Look around you in any part of Venice (especially in the more popular tourist areas during summer) and you’ll see at least two or three people licking their multi-coloured ice cream cones of home made gelati – ice cream in Italian.

You don’t have to walk very far anywhere in Venice to find a cafe or kiosk selling a dozen or more flavours, ranging from ones with exotic-sounding Italian names to more familiar ones and, of course, ubiquitous vanilla. But don’t be fooled, even the vanilla is so tasty you’d swear you’ve come across a real vanilla pod inside your ice cream.

What makes the taste so wonderful seems to be something that simply makes the flavours more real and authentic. many ice cream flavours today are synthetic and taste synthetic and lack the creaminess of ‘old-style’ ice cream. One spoonful of Venitian ice cream and you’ll be certain that you’re eating the real thing.

Finding the ‘best’ ice cream in Venice is a matter of debate, and sometimes legend. Some visitors will return home with dreamy eyes and tales of how they found the heaven of ice creams ‘nearby our hotel in a small alley’ but ask for details and few will recall the name or exact place of the outlet. But rest assured, ice cream vendors dot the city and you won’t have to walk very far to find one.

So whether you’re looking for a snack for yourself or something to motivate the kids with to endure yet another museum visit, you can’t go wrong with Venice ice cream.

You’re about to visit Venice for the first time, but how to pick a hotel?

The growth of the social Internet – where communities of participants exchange views and information online – has also seen an increase in the number of website offering travellers the opportunity to rate their experiences. One outcome of this has been an explosion of the number of personal reviews of hotels and other accommodation. I know, because I’ve posted quite a few reviews myself. 

Now, if you look at the ratings of a hotel, you may find fifty, or a hundred and fifty reviews, depending on the popularity and location of the hotel. The reviews will typically range from five star to one star, depending on how good the experience of the reviewer was. The site will then average all the reviews to give an establishment say, three and a half stars, or four, and so on, giving the reader an instant idea of what the standard of the hotel is.

However with so many rated hotels, so many reviews, and a limited time to make a choice, how to you work through these ratings? To complicate things more, a hotel will almost without exception have review ratings that vary from one star to five. How can people stay at the same hotel and have such divergent experiences? I’ve read reviews on the Danieli in Venice, probably THE place to stay, and can’t believe people having nothing good to say about it.

And then, increasingly, there’s the issue of fraudulent reviews. Some hotels are even in a ‘review war’ with their opposition, posting nasty and glowing reviews on respectively their opposition’s and their own hotels. Sneaky, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s simple ignorance. I once told a guest house owner, who was fairly new to the Internet, about a review site, and he promptly Read the rest of this entry