Museums & galleries
Gallerie dell'Accademia
The Gallerie dell'Accademia is a museum gallery of pre-19th-century art in Venice, northern Italy. It houses the Leonardo da Vinci drawing The Vitruvian Man, which can only be exposed for a few weeks every six years for conservation reasons. It is housed in a building complex comprising the former Scuola Grande, church, and convent of Santa Maria della Carità on the south bank of the Grand Canal, within the sestiere of Dorsoduro.
Gallerie dell'Accademia
This is Venice's main collection of pre-19th-century painting, gathered largely from churches and religious houses suppressed under Napoleonic rule. The draw is seeing Venetian painting develop in one place — Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese — inside a building that was itself once a religious complex, the Scuola Grande and church of Santa Maria della Carità. Leonardo's Vitruvian Man is part of the collection, but it is kept in storage and only shown for brief periods every few years, so most visits will not include it.
Getting there
The gallery sits in Dorsoduro on the Grand Canal, right beside the Ponte dell'Accademia bridge. From Piazza San Marco it's a walk of roughly 10-15 minutes across that bridge, or a short ride on vaporetto lines 1 or 2 to the Accademia stop.
How long to stay
Plan on 1.5 to 2 hours to move through the main rooms without rushing; add time if you want to read the wall texts closely, since the collection is dense with large-scale altarpieces and narrative cycles.
When to go
Mornings tend to be calmer. It gets busy with tour groups and cruise-ship visitors around midday and in high season (spring through early autumn), so an early or late-afternoon visit is easier going.
Nearby
- Ponte dell'Accademia (0.1km) - right outside, worth crossing for the canal view
- Peggy Guggenheim Collection (0.3km) - modern art, a short walk along the same side of the canal
- Ca' Rezzonico (0.4km) - a Grand Canal palace furnished to show 18th-century Venetian life
- Santa Maria della Salute (0.5km) - the domed church at the canal mouth
Sources: open data from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap · Updated August 5, 2026 · Edited by the World by City editors
