Explore Venice in Google Street View

Venice is the clearest demonstration of what Street View is actually capable of, because a camera car has never driven a single metre of it. There are no roads. Everything you can open here was carried through the city on somebody's back, which is why the imagery sits at walking height, moves at walking pace and turns corners a vehicle could not physically take. If you have only ever used Street View from a car's point of view, this is the place to see what the other rig does.

The practical effect is that the alleys work. A calle in Venice is often less than two metres wide, and the buildings on both sides go up four storeys, so the light comes down in a strip. That is exactly what you see on screen, and it is the reason wandering here feels different from wandering anywhere else: you are not following a road with buildings beside it, you are moving through a gap between buildings.

Start at Piazza San Marco, because it is the only large open space in the city and everything else is a reaction to it. From the square, walking north-west towards the Rialto takes you through the densest part of the alley network, where the route signs painted on the walls are the only reliable navigation and they contradict each other. Getting lost here is not a failure of the map; the city was built by people who already knew the way.

The bridges are where Venice gives you the views. There are more than four hundred of them, most only a few steps up and down, and each one is a moment where the alley opens onto water and then closes again. The Rialto and the Accademia are the famous ones and both are covered, but the smaller unnamed bridges are better, because the canal below them still has laundry over it and a boat tied to a post.

Two things are missing and it is worth knowing before you go looking. The canals themselves are only partly covered, because a boat-mounted camera has been down the Grand Canal but not the small ones, so you can travel the main waterway on the water and then have to return to the alleys for everything else. And a good deal of what is behind a door in Venice, the courtyards and the cloisters, is private and was never photographed.

Give the islands a separate visit. Burano is forty minutes out by boat and every house is painted a different saturated colour, reportedly so fishermen could pick out their own in fog. Murano is closer, quieter and built around glass furnaces. Both are covered on foot in the same way as the main island, and both are the answer if you have spent an hour in the alleys and want to see the lagoon do something else.