The answer: read the address as district plus number, then walk from a landmark you can actually see. Venice has six sestieri, and house numbers run 1 to several thousand within each one, so 'San Marco 1234' may be closer to Rialto than to the Basilica. Use the direction signs on the corners - they point to Per Rialto, Per San Marco, Per Piazzale Roma - and follow those to the nearest campo, then take a photo route for the final calli, because a blue dot in Venice jumps across canals.
In Venice your hotel is not at a street number in the usual sense - it is in a sestiere with a number that runs across an entire district, reached through alleys called calli and small squares called campi. Understanding that one fact fixes most Venice navigation problems.
Venice is divided into six sestieri: San Marco, San Polo, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro, Cannaregio and Castello. Each keeps its own numbering from 1 upward, so the same number can exist many times across the city, and a sestiere's numbers can span thousands of doors. That is why 'Campo Santa Margherita 3000' is meaningless without the sestiere - and why your hotel's number tells you almost nothing about the distance from the landmark you just saw.
Venice solves its own maze with directional signs on building corners: Per Rialto, Per San Marco, Per Ferrovia, Per Piazzale Roma. They are the fastest way to move at district scale and they never lie about dead ends - which a map on a phone often does, because canals make some 150-metre walks into 900-metre detours. Plan in two phases: signs to the right campo, then turn-by-turn to the door.
Reading the street type tells you what to expect. Calle is a normal alley between buildings. Campiello is a tiny square, usually with a well head. Campo is a bigger square with a church. Sotoportego is a covered passage through a building - easy to miss because it looks like a doorway. Ruga and salizada are slightly wider streets that historically were paved. If your route includes a sotoportego, treat it as a required turn: missing it means a loop of several hundred metres.
In Venice the phone position is regularly wrong by one canal: the receiver sees a straight line to a satellite over the lagoon while you are inside a colonnade, so it snaps to the nearest plausible place - often the parallel alley on the other side of the water. Never cross a bridge or enter a calle because the dot says so; cross because the sign, the campo or the photo in your route says so.
Every arrival involves crossing bridges, and some of them have steps - which matters when a '5 minute walk' from the vaporetto stop turns into a stair portage. Check how many bridges your route crosses and whether they have ramps. Our Venice photo routes start at the vaporetto landing and photograph each calle and turn, so you know before you book whether the last stretch is flat or stepped. Comparing costs? Our Italy rent comparison gives the current city-level picture.