La Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale)

La Biennale di Venezia, founded in 1895, is one of the world's oldest and most influential international exhibitions. It is based in the Castello district of Venice, in Italy's Veneto region, with main venues at the Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale. The event alternates between an international art exhibition in odd years and an architecture exhibition in even years, so the character of the show shifts completely from edition to edition. At the Giardini, a park of trees and paths on the eastern edge of the city, national pavilions stand as permanent buildings, several of them architectural statements in their own right from the early twentieth century onward. Each participating country curates its own pavilion, and the central pavilion hosts the main curated exhibition. At the Arsenale, former shipyard halls and rope-making sheds provide long industrial spaces for large installations. Many additional exhibitions and collateral events appear in palazzi and campi across the city. The result is less a single museum visit than a sprawling circuit that can take a full day to cover properly, with three to four hours a bare minimum for a single site. During Biennale years the sites are open Saturday to Thursday from 11AM to 7PM and on Fridays from 11AM to 8PM, and a single-day adult ticket costs about 25 euros, with a reduced child rate of about 14 euros. The exhibition runs for several months, generally from spring to late autumn, and outside those periods the pavilions are closed. Crowds are heaviest at the opening previews and on weekends, while weekday afternoons are calmer. Vaporetto Lines 1 and 2 stop at Giardini, and the Arsenale is a short walk along the waterfront. The Giardini paths and pavilion exteriors make the best photographic subjects, though photography rules inside individual pavilions vary by artist and country.