San Giuliano Parking (Mestre)

ABOVE: A car leaves the Porta Gialla parking lot at San Giuliano in Mestre. INSET BELOW: A path in the Parco San Giuliano, and the Porta Gialla or Yellow Gate.

Parking in Venice can be expensive: The last time we checked, a day's parking for a normal car was €22 at the Tronchetto parking garage just outside the historic center and a whopping €45 at the Garage San Marco in Venice's Piazzale Roma.

If such rates are too rich for your travel budget, you may prefer ASM Venezia's San Giuliano Car Parks on the Venetian mainland, where the daily rate for cars is an astonishing bargain by Venice standards. In addition to saving money, you'll avoid the risk of getting stuck in a traffic jam on the causeway between the mainland and Venice on a busy weekend or during high season.

The Parcheggi San Giuliano along the edge of the Parco San Giuliano in Mestre, a large regional park that you'll see across a canal on your left as you approach the causeway to Venice.

The park has three public lots: yellow, red, and blue. You can park overnight in the Porta Gialla (yellow) lot, but parking in the red and blue lots is forbidden from 2 to 6 a.m.

For more information (including hours, rates, and a downloadable map), see the official San Giuliano Car Parks page.

From the parking lots, you can reach Venice by boat (see below) via  either of two ACTV public bus routes (Linea 5 and Linea 24h) or on the T1 tram (see our article). If you take the bus or tram, you'll need to buy an ACTV transit ticket at the parking lot's booth and validate it upon boarding.

For maximum convenience during daytime hours, you can buy a package from Marive Transport that combines daily or overnight parking with roundtrip boat transportation between San Giuliano and central Venice. From the boat's landing point on Venice's Fondamente Nove, it's an easy walk to the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, and other destinations in the city center.