Venice Travel Guide (Venice, Italy)

The torpor of Venice after dark is inversely proportional to the hustle of its shopping streets in the daytime, when vast sums are trawled daily from the tourists' pockets. It's easy to get the impression that Venice's shops are polarized at two extremes - geared either to the trinket trade or to expense-account fashion and accessories. The middle ground does exist, however, and it doesn't take too much ferreting around to find it: small workshops all over the city produce a range of reasonably priced items such as bags, masks and decorative papers; unusual prints and books are on sale in a number of shops; and there's even the odd bargain to be picked up amid the antique stalls