Gallerie dell'Accademia

What it is

The Gallerie dell'Accademia holds the state collection of Venetian painting from the fourteenth century to the early nineteenth, standing on the Dorsoduro bank of the Grand Canal at the foot of the Accademia bridge. It is not a survey museum of world art. It is one city's school of painting, assembled largely from churches, convents and confraternities that the Napoleonic suppressions closed, and shown inside the buildings of three of those institutions: the Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Carità, the church beside it, and the convent of the Lateran canons begun by Andrea Palladio in 1561. The Scuola was the oldest of Venice's six Scuole Grandi, its building dating from 1343, and Bartolomeo Bon finished the church facade in 1441. The Accademia di Belle Arti, founded in 1750, was moved into the complex by Napoleonic decree in 1807, and the collection opened to the public on 10 August 1817. Gallery and art school separated administratively in 1879 and physically in 2004, when the school left for the Ospedale degli Incurabili. The museum kept the buildings and the name, which is also why the bridge and the vaporetto landing are called Accademia. It is a state museum under the Italian Ministry of Culture. Its most famous single sheet, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, belongs to the collection but is almost never on a wall.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The route is chronological and runs over two levels. It begins upstairs, where the rooms are numbered in Roman figures and cover roughly 1300 to 1600, and ends on the ground floor, where Arabic numbers carry the story from the seventeenth century to about 1880. Room I is the fourteenth-century gold-ground room, with Paolo Veneziano, Lorenzo Veneziano and Jacobello del Fiore. Rooms II to VI are Bellini territory, Giovanni Bellini's altarpieces hanging near Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Cosmè Tura in room IV. Room VII holds Bosch's triptych of the hermit saints, an outsider in a Venetian collection. Room VIII has Giorgione's Tempest, a canvas of 82 by 73 centimetres that is smaller than almost every reproduction of it. Room X is given to Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi, 560 by 1309 centimetres, painted in 1573 for a Dominican refectory and renamed by the painter after the Inquisition objected to its dwarf, its dogs and its German halberdiers. Room XI sets Tintoretto's Miracle of the Slave of 1547 beside Titian and Giambattista Tiepolo. Downstairs, room 2 is Tiepolo, room 3 Fetti, Liss and Saraceni, room 6 Pietro Longhi and Piazzetta, room 7 Canova, room 1 Hayez. Room XVII is the temporary exhibition space, so its contents change.

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How long to spend

The museum publishes no suggested length for an independent visit. What it does publish is the length of its own guided routes: the History and Masterpieces tour of the permanent collection runs one hour fifteen minutes, and the version combined with the current temporary exhibition runs two hours fifteen. Those are the honest brackets. Two hours is the figure to plan on for a first visit at an ordinary pace, reading the labels in the rooms that matter and walking past the rest. Ninety minutes is enough if the aim is the named pictures, because the upstairs sequence is short and several of the largest rooms are closed for restoration, which makes the current circuit briefer than older guidebooks assume. Three hours suits anyone who wants to sit down in front of the Bellinis, and portable stools are handed out free at the entrance for exactly that. Work backwards from the closing arrangements rather than from seven in the evening: ticket sales stop at six, and staff begin moving visitors towards the exit from half past six. Arriving after half past five buys a thin visit.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The museum is shut every Monday, and that is the single scheduling fact worth building a Venice itinerary around, because the Accademia bridge crossing is a natural pairing with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Salute, and a Monday plan loses this one. Otherwise it opens at nine and closes at seven, Tuesday through Sunday. Nine o'clock is the quiet half hour. Coach groups and cruise arrivals reach Dorsoduro later than they reach San Marco, so the first hour here is genuinely calmer than the equivalent hour across the water, and Giorgione's Tempest, which is small and draws a permanent standing crowd, can briefly be looked at from a normal distance. The first Sunday of every month is free under the Ministry of Culture's Domenica al Museo scheme, with no booking and first-come entry, which makes it the busiest day of the month by a wide margin; go then only if the saving matters more than the space. Friday evening is the opposite case, calm and late, and for visitors between 26 and 35 the reduced Arteritivo ticket covers 17:15 to 19:00. Rain is an argument for coming: this is an indoor museum two minutes from a vaporetto stop.

Checked 2026-08-26

Tickets

Full admission is 20.00 euro per person. Citizens of the European Union aged 18 to 25 pay 2.00 euro, and under-18s enter free. Three other individual rates exist: Arteritivo at 15.00 euro for visitors aged 26 to 35, valid on Fridays between 17:15 and 19:00 with last entry at 18:00; a 17.00 euro rate for holders of a ticket from another Dorsoduro Museum Mile site, meaning Palazzo Cini, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection or Punta della Dogana; and the Insieme rate, also 17.00 euro, for adults over 26 travelling in a group of 10 to 25. Group booking and purchase are by telephone only, on 800150666 within Italy or +39 041 5243354 from abroad, with the call centre open daily from 9 to 18. The museum names TicketOne as the only authorised online reseller and recommends buying ahead on busy days, since an online ticket gives priority entry when there is a queue. A ticket desk operates at the museum and takes cash, Pagobancomat, Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Audio guides are a separate 6.00 euro; the Italian Sign Language video guide is free. Ticket sales end at 18:00.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

No car is involved. The museum stands at Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro 1050, inside a historic centre that has no road access, so every arrival is on foot or by water. The museum publishes its own walking times: about 20 minutes and 1.5 kilometres from Piazzale Roma, about 25 minutes and 1.8 kilometres from Santa Lucia station, about 15 minutes and 1 kilometre from Piazza San Marco across the Accademia bridge, and about 5 minutes and 350 metres from the Zattere along Rio Terà Foscarini past the Gesuati church. By water the stop is Accademia, served by vaporetto lines 1 and 2 and the night line N. From Piazzale Roma or the station take the Lido direction; from San Marco take the Piazzale Roma direction. The landing is a short walk from the entrance, and the museum recommends the boat over the walk for anyone with a pushchair or in rain, since the walking routes cross stepped bridges. Step-free entry is not the main door: the barrier-free entrance is on the right-hand side of the building, in Calle della Carità, with lifts and platform lifts inside.

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What to watch out for

Two disappointments are worth knowing about before the ticket is bought. The first is the Vitruvian Man: the museum's own catalogue entry marks it not exhibited, for conservation reasons, and it explains that drawings are kept in darkness under controlled conditions and are never on permanent display. The drawings and prints cabinet is separately closed to consultation while restoration work is under way. Nobody should plan this visit around Leonardo. The second is the teleri. Rooms XVIII to XXIII are closed for restoration, and with them go the great narrative cycles: Carpaccio's Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Rialto is listed as under restoration in room XX, and the Dream of Saint Ursula is marked not exhibited in room XXI. Elsewhere, backpacks and bulky bags may not be taken into the galleries; free lockers take a one euro coin as a returnable deposit and hold items up to 45 by 35 by 65 centimetres. Visitors relying on step-free routes should read the museum's accessibility notices first: there are no platform lifts between rooms XXII and XXIV, and the lift between rooms VI/b and X is out of service.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

The museum publishes no photography rule on its website. Its visitor services page, its accessibility page and its own site search return nothing on cameras, flash or tripods, so the honest advice is to read the signage at the entrance and ask a room attendant, and to treat the temporary exhibition rooms as separately governed, because loans usually come with their own restrictions. Assume flash is unwelcome in rooms full of four-hundred-year-old varnish, whatever a sign does or does not say. The practical problem is light rather than permission. The galleries are lit low and evenly for conservation, and the largest canvases hang high, so a phone will reach for a slow shutter and blur. Brace against a doorframe or a wall rather than raising sensitivity, and shoot the pictures whole rather than hunting detail. The room to photograph is X, where Veronese's thirteen-metre banquet only makes sense from the far wall, and the one to give up on is VIII, where the Tempest is small, dark and normally screened by people. Windows on the canal side throw strong morning light across the floor, which is a picture in itself and a reflection on any glazed panel.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata