Rules to travel are finally easier and visitors are coming back to Venice. The city is welcoming its guests in a slow-moving atmosphere, bars and restaurants in the squares, quiet alleyways and challenging exhibitions.

The Architecture Biennale, located in the Giardini and in the ancient Arsenal, proposes this year to look ahead in the future and see which strategies we need to choose to live well through times of change.

Most interesting is an exhibition about Massimo Campigli, one of the major representatives of Italian art in the 20th century. His meeting with the world of the Etruscans, where he would find a deep inspiration, would change his way of painting and turn to classical, archaic compositions.

Not to be missed is an exhibition about Maurizio Pellegrin, a Venetian-born artist who lives in New York. Pellegrin’s works are meditations on time, on the slippery relationship between presence and absence, on the material marks left by men and things that are now distant. Ancient clothes, old photographs, drawings, balls of wool, fabrics, looms and whips are reassembled into new images.

Besides the many temporary exhibitions you can find quiet churches with works of Venetian masters like Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bellini; you can enjoy strolling through the city and pass by palaces with oriental arches, stop on bridges that offer asymmetric and intriguing views, sit in a cafe along a Canal or on a bench in a square: actually all of this has always been there but this year the city seems to be revealing itself in a new way.

Please inquire about my tours to the exhibitions of Pellegrino, Campigli or the Architecture Biennale: cristina@slowvenice