Venice has been doubling as a film set for nearly a century, and one writer who was in town for the Venice Film Festival has mapped out exactly where to find the city's starriest backdrops. The good news: most of them cost nothing to see.

The Grand Canal and Rialto Bridge are the obvious starting point. This stretch of water has carried doomed romance in The Souvenir (2019), Katharine Hepburn's sun-soaked affair in David Lean's Summertime (1955), and the tragic finale of Casino Royale (2006), which sees Vesper trapped inside the sinking Palazzo Pisani Moretta — a palazzo that, in reality, is still very much standing and easy to admire from the water. Less elegantly, the Rialto was also demolished by a CGI water villain in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

St Mark's Square is essentially compulsory, on screen and off. Caffè Florian appears in Summertime as the spot where Hepburn's character first meets her lover, and Bond hovercrafts across the square in Moonraker (1979), much to the alarm of a now-legendary pigeon. A coffee at Florian will set you back around €12, which is either outrageous or a fair price for atmosphere, depending on your mood.

For something quieter, Campo San Barnaba doubles as the library exterior in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and it's also where Hepburn famously fell into the canal while framing a shot — repeatedly, and in genuinely dirty water, which led to an eye infection she blamed on the film for life. The area is lively but far less packed than San Marco.

From there it's a 15-minute walk to the Chiesa di San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, the crumbling church Donald Sutherland restores in the 1973 horror classic Don't Look Now. It sits well off the tourist trail — the writer found it deserted at sunset — with bars nearby along the Ponte de la Piova where locals actually drink.

Two more stops for the dedicated: the Murano islands, home to the Venini Glass Furnace that Bond visits in Moonraker, and which appeared in the 1934 proto-neorealist drama The Canal of the Angels. And on the Lido, just minutes from the festival's main screenings, stands the shuttered Grand Hotel des Bains, once the height of glamour, now fenced off and decaying. It was the setting for Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Visconti's 1971 film version, and it stood in for Cairo's Shepheard's Hotel in The English Patient (1996).

If you're planning a trip around the festival itself, held every September on the seven-mile Lido island, note that plenty of screenings are open to the public — you don't need an industry lanyard to join in. Otherwise, Venice films beautifully year-round.

Why it matters: this is one of the few cities where you can build an entire holiday around cinema without spending extra. Every location above is free to see, mostly walkable, and the itinerary naturally pulls you away from the worst crowds into quieter campi and local bars.

Getting there: BA flies from the UK to Venice from around £102 return, Jet2 from £64, or you can rail it via Paris, Turin or Milan. For a film-friendly base, the Hotel Flora sits three minutes from Piazza San Marco with rooms from £260 a night. Source: The Independent Travel