The Venezia FC Matchday Guide: How to Experience the Stadio Penzo Before It’s Gone

There is a new stadium coming. It will open in 2027. It will be modern, functional, and on the mainland. It will have adequate parking and no flooding risk and a concourse that doesn’t feel like it was designed in 1952, because it wasn’t.

It will also not be surrounded by a lagoon, accessible only by boat, or located on an island that has been hosting football since 1913. And that will be the end of something that, once it’s gone, nobody will be able to adequately explain to anyone who didn’t see it.

The Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo is the second-oldest football ground still in use in Italy. It sits on Sant’Elena, a quiet residential island at the eastern tip of Venice — the part tourists almost never reach, because there is nothing there except a church, a park, some permanent residents, and a football club. Getting to a match there requires a decision most visitors never make: to leave the postcard version of Venice behind and go somewhere the city actually lives.

You should make that decision. Venezia play one more season at the Penzo before the move. After that, this version of matchday is gone.

Why Venezia FC Right Now Matters

For most of the last two decades, Venezia FC operated in Serie B and below — a club of considerable style and intermittent chaos, beloved locally, largely invisible to the wider footballing world.

The 2024/25 Serie A promotion changed that. A rare window opened: combining a weekend break in a UNESCO World Heritage city with a top-flight match against AC Milan, Napoli, Juventus, or Inter. Foreign fans started paying attention in ways they hadn’t before. The Penzo hosted Serie A football for the first time in almost twenty years.

This is not a polished stadium. It never pretended to be. The temporary tubular stands, the wooden infrastructure, the pillars with obstructed sightlines — these are features of a ground that has been fighting its own city’s geography for over a century. They are also part of why it feels like nowhere else.

The window is closing. When the Bosco dello Sport opens in Tessera — near Marco Polo airport, 18,500 seats, designed by Populous — a perfectly adequate ground will replace an irreplaceable one. Venezia will be a bigger club in a better facility. The Penzo will be history.

Before the Match: Where to Be in Venice

Most foreign football fans arriving for a Venezia matchday make the same mistake — they spend the morning in San Marco or at the Rialto, eating near the tourist corridors, and then head to the stadium an hour before kickoff. This is fine. It is also a waste of a morning.

Castello is where to start. The sestiere that stretches east from the Rialto toward Sant’Elena is the most residential district of Venice — the one least colonised by tourist infrastructure, the one where people actually live year-round. It is a local area with an unpretentious residential feel, cheaper than the busier tourist areas, and only a short walk from the stadium.

Via Garibaldi is the corridor that connects Castello to Sant’Elena, and on matchday it functions as an unofficial pre-match gathering point. What was once a canal, later filled in under Napoleon, becomes a street lined with supporters — locals, students, people who have lived in Venice their whole lives and come back from the mainland on matchdays to reconnect with something specific. The bars here are not tourist bars. The prices are not tourist prices. A spritz costs what a spritz should cost.

What to eat before a Venezia match:

• Sarde in saor — sardines marinated with onions, raisins, and pine nuts; the definitive Venetian dish, sweet and sharp simultaneously, found in almost any bacaro worth the name
• Baccalà mantecato — salt cod whipped with olive oil until it becomes a pale, impossibly rich cream, served on grilled polenta or bread. It sounds plain. It isn’t.
• Cicchetti — Venice’s answer to tapas, the small bar snacks consumed standing up with a glass of local white or prosecco. No sit-down lunch required. No menu to navigate. Just point.

The bacari along Via Garibaldi and in the side streets off Riva degli Schiavoni handle all of this without ceremony. You do not need a reservation or a plan.

The Journey to the Ground

This is the part that has no equivalent anywhere else in football.

Getting to Stadio Penzo is an adventure in itself. Unlike traditional football grounds, it is accessible primarily by boat or on foot through Venice’s narrow streets. Vaporetto Line 1 runs the length of the Grand Canal and out to Sant’Elena — a ride that passes the Ca’ d’Oro, the Accademia, the Salute — before depositing you, along with several hundred people in orange and black, at a stop five minutes from the turnstiles.

The anticipation builds as the vaporetto approaches the dock, with chants echoing over the canals. There is no stadium road, no car park, no feeder bus. There is a narrow path through a residential neighbourhood, trees on either side, the sound of drums ahead. It is a genuinely strange and brilliant way to arrive at a football match.

Getting in — what you need to know:

Tickets are available through the club’s official website, which redirects to Vivaticket, their authorised seller. They go on sale in the week before matchday. For bigger fixtures they sell out — buy early. Prices start at around €24 for the Curva sections and rise to €59–€79 for the Tribuna and VIP areas, depending on opposition.

You can also buy at the Penzo ticket office on matchday itself, though the queues build fast. There are two official club stores in Venice where tickets are sold in advance: the store at Campo S.S. Apostoli (open daily) and the Ca’ Venezia store in Mestre.

Bring your passport or ID regardless of how you purchase. Security is surprisingly thorough for a stadium of this size. Document checks take time. Arrive at least forty-five minutes before kickoff.

A Venezia FC match ticket waives Venice’s tourist entry fee — one of the more cost-effective ways to spend a day in a city that has been progressively charging day-trippers just to walk around.

Inside the Penzo

Standing beneath the swirling green, orange and black banners emblazoned with the Lion of Venice, you will find gondoliers and students, barmen and Murano glass workers all bellowing out football chants. The Penzo’s Curva Sud creates a scarf mosaic at the start of each match — a ritual that belongs to this stadium specifically, a gesture of collective identity from a community that uses the football club to stay connected to a city that keeps pricing its own people out.

In a city where tourism and university are displacing residential communities, there is something genuinely special about experiencing this tribal belonging and passion for calcio here on the terraces.

The sightlines are imperfect. The facilities are minimal. The roof does not fully cover the away end and when it rains at the Penzo — and it does rain — you feel it. None of this matters in the way you’d expect. The intimacy of the ground, the chants that echo over the lagoon, the proximity to the pitch — these compensate for everything the stadium lacks by every modern metric.

What Foreign Fans Almost Always Miss

The Penzo is not a stadium you experience from a distance. The stands are so close to the pitch that you can hear the goalkeeper's instructions. The Curva Sud is twenty metres from the corner flag. When a Venezia player wins a tackle near the touchline, the entire end moves forward as one.

Foreign fans who arrive for kick-off miss the two hours before it — the bacari filling up on Via Garibaldi, the vaporetto loading with orange and black, the walk through the pine grove with drums already audible from inside. That build-up is the version of the day most people come for without knowing it exists. The football is the finale. The city is the event.

Venice does not accommodate large groups. The streets in Castello are narrow, the vaporettos are small, and Via Garibaldi on a matchday afternoon is a place you move through in pairs, not crowds. Twelve people is the right number. More than that and you stop being part of the neighbourhood and start being a procession through it.

After the Match

Post-match, the walk back along the waterfront toward Riva degli Schiavoni is as good as the walk to the stadium. Supporters spill into the winding streets and bridges heading back toward Via Garibaldi, gathering at bars to share drinks and relive key moments.

The vaporetto home is its own thing. Forty people in orange and black on a public water-bus, gliding past the Doge’s Palace. Venice at night. Football behind you.

There is no version of this at a stadium near an airport.