My name is Matteo Currò. I was born in the province of Venice in 1990, grew up between Mestre and Venice, and Unlock Venice began, first and foremost, from my relationship with these places.
I’m not a tour guide, and I have no intention of pretending to be one. I’m simply someone who lives here, works here and is still curious about the city he grew up around.
For several years I worked in Padua. Eventually, the pull to come back and work in Venice won out: today I work at Ca’ Foscari University, dealing with applications, systems and data. That means Venice isn’t somewhere I visit a few times a year: I’m there virtually every day.
Venice, every day
I see it in August, when it can feel as though there is no room left for anyone, and on winter mornings when some calli become almost silent again. In sunshine, rain and fog, at high tide and low tide. When it looks impossibly theatrical, and when it is simply a city waking up and going to work.
That is probably one of the reasons I started writing Unlock Venice.
Every day I see visitors arrive in Venice and follow more or less the same route: station, Rialto, San Marco, a few photographs, then back again. There is nothing wrong with that: these places are extraordinary, and pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. But Venice becomes much more interesting as soon as you step outside the main flow.
I don’t think Venice is simply a city to visit. You have to let it happen to you.
Sometimes you need to take the wrong calle, cross a bridge without knowing exactly what is waiting on the other side, stop in a campo that was never part of the plan and slow down.
That is why Unlock Venice does not always give you rigid itineraries to follow metre by metre. Some articles are deliberately just a taste of something: a place, a story, a Venetian word, a church, an island or a detail you might otherwise have walked straight past.
The idea is not to tell you exactly where to look every minute of the day. It is to give you a few more reasons to look around.
It is also why you will find practical, up-to-date information on the site, including weather and tide conditions. When Venice is part of your daily life, you quickly learn that the same city can feel completely different depending on the time of day, the season and what the lagoon is doing.
A few of my Venetian rituals
Then there are places and habits that, for me, have very little to do with a ranking of “things to see” and much more to do with the simple pleasure of being in Venice.
One of my favourite places is Fondamenta degli Ormesini, especially around aperitivo time in spring and autumn. When the days are getting longer but the city has not yet reached the intensity of summer, stopping at Al Timon for a drink or at Paradiso Perduto is one of those simple pleasures that, to me, is worth far more than many carefully planned itineraries.
Another place I’m fond of is Bacareto da Lele. It has managed to hold on to a genuinely student-friendly spirit, prices included, and you can find people standing outside at almost any hour of the day. Unless, of course, the owner has simply decided not to open that day. Somehow that is part of the place too.
I also love the Giudecca, perhaps precisely because it is so often overlooked. It has a different rhythm and a relationship with the water and the San Marco basin that completely changes your perspective on the city. It is also where I like to watch the fireworks during the Festa del Redentore: not necessarily from the front row, but in an atmosphere that feels much closer to the Venice I know.
And then there are the tiny rituals that never make it into guidebooks. One of mine is stopping at Tonolo for pastries to bring back to the office. Sometimes there is an occasion to celebrate; other times we simply feel like sharing something good together. It is a small thing, but Venice, to me, is made of this too: work, habits, colleagues, coffee breaks and conviviality, not just monuments.
Before tourism, there was the web
There is another part of my story that explains why this project exists as a website in the first place.
I started experimenting with the web when I was very young and have worked professionally in the field since 2010. I worked as a web designer, spent years working independently and built digital projects for a long time. Technology is still my profession today, although in a different form, within Ca’ Foscari University.
Unlock Venice brings these two parts of my life together: the web and the place where I grew up.
So this is not a guide produced by an editorial team somewhere far from Venice. It is a personal project that grows article by article, starting from things I know, places I return to, details I notice and subjects that make me curious enough to want to dig deeper.
If you would like to understand the editorial idea behind the project, I have explained in more detail what Unlock Venice is and why it exists.
And then there is an apartment
The Unlock Venice apartment was not simply a property I happened to choose and turn into a holiday rental.
It is the home I lived in as a child, until I was about seven years old.
I am inevitably attached to it. In 2026 I decided to renovate it completely, almost from scratch, and turn it into the kind of apartment I would personally choose as a base for a few days between Mestre and Venice.
I do not think it is perfect in any absolute sense, and I have no interest in presenting it as though it were.
What I do think is that it makes a particularly good base for two people: close enough to Venice to make getting there straightforward, but right in the centre of Mestre, in an area that is still part of my everyday life. I live about ten minutes away from the apartment by bike and, setting off from there towards the lagoon, you can cycle to Piazzale Roma in roughly half an hour.
That also means something very simple: when I host someone here, I am not renting out a home in a city I know only as a tourist or as a distant property owner. I live nearby and move through the same area every day.
Yes, there are downsides too
The most obvious one is easy to explain: the apartment is on the fourth floor and, at the moment, the building has no lift.
I would rather say that clearly than bury it at the bottom of a description. If you have reduced mobility, very heavy luggage or simply dislike stairs, it is something you should seriously consider before booking.
If we want to find an upside, you could call it a little advance training: in Venice, between one bridge and the next, you will be climbing quite a few steps anyway.
A lift may eventually be installed in the building. For now, however, I would rather describe the situation exactly as it is.
Why Mestre
You can read almost anything about Mestre online.
Sometimes it is described as nothing more than the cheap place to sleep if you want to visit Venice. Other times, reading certain discussions, you would think it was somewhere you should escape from the moment you step off the train.
As usual, reality is far less extreme.
Mestre is the mainland part of the Municipality of Venice and a city where tens of thousands of people live their everyday lives. It has better areas and less appealing ones, places where it makes sense to be a little more alert at night and others that are extremely quiet. Much like most cities.
The apartment is in central Mestre, around a hundred metres from Piazza Ferretto and on Viale Garibaldi: a long tree-lined avenue that I personally consider one of the most pleasant streets in the city. Bars, restaurants, shops and everyday life are not somewhere you need to catch a bus to reach: they are just outside the door.
I have written more about this side of Mestre in the guide to Mestre city centre, Piazza Ferretto and its porticoes.
And Mestre certainly does not end there.
Just before the Ponte della Libertà lies Forte Marghera, a former military area that has become one of the mainland’s most interesting cultural and social spaces. Especially from spring to autumn, it hosts exhibitions, festivals, performances and events, alongside places where you can stop for food or a drink. On the right evening, it is one of those places where you are far more likely to find locals than tourists.
A little farther on is Parco San Giuliano, directly overlooking the lagoon. The wider redevelopment project covers a much larger area, while the completed park itself currently extends across roughly 74 hectares. It is more than large enough for cycling, running, a long walk or simply sitting down and looking across the water towards Venice.
At dawn, when the lagoon begins to catch the light and Venice is still a distant outline on the horizon, it is one of my favourite places on the mainland.
Mestre does not need to pretend to be Venice
And perhaps this is the most important point of all.
I am not going to try to convince anyone that staying in Mestre is the same as opening your window onto a canal in Cannaregio. It isn’t.
If your dream is to step outside your accommodation at seven in the morning and find Venice immediately around you, staying in the historic centre is a different and wonderful experience.
But that does not mean Mestre should be treated as a second-rate choice.
It can simply be a different kind of base: more everyday, easier to reach from the mainland, with a life of its own in the evening and Venice very close by. For some travellers it will be the right choice; for others it will not.
Unlock Venice is trying to restore exactly this balance: to describe Venice properly without selling an illusion, and to describe Mestre properly without pretending it is something it is not.
A slightly different way of hosting
In the end, the guide and the apartment come from the same idea.
Not promising “the authentic Venice” as though there were some secret formula known only to locals. Not selling supposedly hidden corners that everyone already knows. Not pretending Mestre is Venice’s historic centre. Not hiding the fourth floor because it might cost me a booking.
I would rather people knew where they were going, and then had enough information to build their own trip around it.
Unlock Venice does not want to tell you how you should experience Venice. It wants to give you enough ideas to find your own.
If, during your trip, you end up in a calle you never planned to walk down, spend an evening in Mestre without feeling that you are simply “outside Venice”, discover a church you had never heard of or stop for five extra minutes just to look across the lagoon, then this project has probably done what it was created to do.
