Venice Tours

www.toursbylocals.com offers highly qualified local tour guides all over the world. Click on the map of the place you want to visit and read about the guides and their trips. 1.5 days is not very long in Venice. With that length of time you'll probably be spending most of your time around St. Mark's Square seeing the big touristy sights...Doges Palace, St. Mark's Basilica, Campanile etc. Hopefully you'll make reservations to those places so you don't have to wait in the miserably long line of tourists that are ALWAYS queued up there thanks to the thousands of daytrippers and cruise line passengers that choke Venice's St. Mark's Square during the day. The best time to be in Venice starts about 4:30 pm as all of those day trippers head back to their cruise ships or surrounding areas from whence they came. Venice Island then becomes a totally different place....MUCH MUCH better. Do yourself a favor and spend a few days on Venice Island (not in Mestre).

In Venice, I highly recommend Walks Inside Venice, especially if this is your first trip. Roberta and her staff do a wonderful introduction to Venice, and have other tours focused on specific interest.
http://www.walksinsidevenice.com/index.php

For my trip in 2012 I used Artviva, doing the Venice in one glorious day tour, which included a gondola ride and a boat tour of the grand canal. It was great except that there was a heavy downpour during the gondola ride. I've never felt so wet in my life! My shoes took 2 days to dry.

In 2014 I saw all the local sights on my own (quite easy to do), except for Alessandro's cicchetti pub crawl which I highly recommend and his offbeat Venice walk. It was the highlight of my entire trip!

Context Venice is great – groups of six or smaller, and guides who are well-qualified academically, engaging, and native English speakers or very fluent. Because the groups are so small, the guides routinely shape the tour to group interests – often the first questions are things like… Why are you taking this tour? Do you have specific places you want to visit? What have you already seen?

I've used them a number of times, and even when visiting places I've visited before, learned so much. Also, they are a wonderful compromise between the larger group tours and the cost of a private guide. Their website lists their scheduled walking tours, and also provides information about arranging private tours.