Venice Bacari: What a Bacaro Is and How to Order at the Counter

What is a bacaro?

A bacaro is a small Venetian bar that sells wine by the glass with something to eat beside it. The glass is an ombra; the food is cicchetti, single mouthfuls laid out on the counter under glass or made to order behind it. The plainest bacari have a wooden counter, a row of open bottles, no tables and no music. The grander ones keep a back room with tables and a short menu, which moves them towards being an osteria or a restaurant.

The word itself is Venetian and its origin is unsettled. The oldest recorded sense of bacaro was a strong wine from southern Italy, and only later did the word attach to the premises that poured it. The two popular explanations, descent from Bacchus and a link to the Venetian phrase far bacara (to make merry), have both been judged unconvincing on the evidence, and one recent proposal reads bacaro as an adjective formed from bacara, cackling or carousing, applied to a wine that makes noise in the head (Baglioni, 2022).

For a visitor the working definition is simpler. A bacaro is where you can eat and drink standing, for the few minutes it takes, without booking a table, ordering a course or sitting down.

How much does a bacaro cost, and how to check before you order

No public authority publishes a price survey for wine by the glass or for cicchetti in Venice. Prices are set bar by bar and move with the street, the hour and whether you stand or sit, so any figure quoted for an ombra describes one counter on one day. This page therefore carries none.

What is fixed is your right to see the price before you order. Veneto's law on food and drink businesses requires every such business to display the price of what it serves, stating the service the price refers to, at the counter or at the table, clearly and legibly to the public from outside the premises during opening hours, by sign, price list or other suitable means (Regione del Veneto, 2007, art. 30). Venice's own regulation imposes the obligation twice over: a table of prices inside the premises, and a second one outside it or at least readable from outside (Comune di Venezia, 2018, art. 8).

So the check takes a few seconds. Read the listino at the door, note whether the figure shown is the counter price or the table price, and look for the line on service and cover before you sit down. Where a bar sells a fixed-price menu, it may not add service, cover or anything else that was not advertised in the offer itself (Comune di Venezia, 2018, art. 8, comma 2). A bar with no list on show is already breaking a rule, which tells you something before you order.

How ordering and paying at the counter works

Ordering is verbal and quick. Catch the eye of whoever is behind the counter, ask for what you want to drink, then point at the cicchetti you want and they go on a plate or a napkin. Wine by the glass comes from open bottles or from the tap. In most bacari one glass with one or two cicchetti is the normal order rather than a round of drinks, and you eat where you stand, at the counter or at a shelf along the wall.

Payment varies by bar. Some run a tab and total it when you leave, counting the empty glasses and plates in front of you. Others expect payment at the till as you order, which is usual at the busiest hours near the Rialto. Cards are widely accepted and small change is still useful. Nothing is added for seating you did not use.

Two city rules shape what happens at the edge of the counter. A business selling or serving food and drink may not hand out trays for consumption outside its own premises, and a shop may not put an adjacent or nearby room at its customers' disposal for eating or drinking what it has sold (Comune di Venezia, 2024, art. 18, commi 2 and 6). Extending the service area onto boats or mooring structures is banned outright under the same article. The bacaro ends where its licensed space ends.

Standing at the counter or sitting at a table

The gap between the standing price and the seated price is real and lawful, provided it is declared. Both the regional law and the city regulation require the price list to state the service a price refers to, at the counter or at the table, so a bar charging more for a seated glass has to show both figures (Regione del Veneto, 2007, art. 30; Comune di Venezia, 2018, art. 8). Where service is at the table, the list or table of prices must be put in front of customers before they order, and it must set out any service and cover component so that the price is clearly and easily understood (Comune di Venezia, 2018, art. 8, comma 3).

Seating on the pavement is a separate matter again. A plateatico stands on public land held under concession, which is part of why a terrace is priced differently from the counter a metre inside. The city's urban police regulation also forbids consuming food and drink from glass, ceramic, terracotta or any other non-disposable container outside those concession areas, with a reduced-payment fine of 200 EUR (Comune di Venezia, 2024, art. 32, comma 2). In practice the glass stays inside the bar or on its own terrace: carrying it onto the bridge outside is an offence, not a local custom.

Opening hours, the giro di ombre and the city's drinking rules

Opening hours are not set by the city. Venice's regulation states that the hours of food and drink businesses are free, and requires each one to notify the hours and days it has chosen and to display them on a sign legible from outside while it is open (Comune di Venezia, 2018, art. 6, comma 1). Regional law allows up to two weekly closing days, so a bacaro shut on a Sunday and a Monday is within the rules (Regione del Veneto, 2007, art. 28). The mayor retains the power to impose hour limits on named premises for reasons of public order or public interest (Comune di Venezia, 2018, art. 6, comma 3).

What that leaves is custom. Bacari near the markets open in the morning, because market trade is their first trade, and counters fill again from about 18:00 as people stop on the way home. The giro di ombre is that second slot: two or three bacari in sequence, a glass and a couple of cicchetti in each, finished before dinner.

The evening has legal edges. Shops and artisan food businesses may not sell alcohol of any strength after 21:00, and no business may sell takeaway alcohol in uncapped glass bottles or glass cups, each carrying a reduced-payment fine of 400 EUR (Comune di Venezia, 2024, art. 32, commi 3 and 4). Eating or drinking while seated on the ground in a public place is prohibited at 200 EUR, and fines under the article run from 25 EUR to 500 EUR. Licensed bars serving at their own counters are outside the 21:00 limit, which applies to shops and artisans.

Which sestieri have the most bacari

The city's own register gives the shape of the trade. The Comune's open dataset of food and drink licences, extracted on 1 July 2016, lists 1,013 licensed positions at historic-centre addresses: 222 in Cannaregio, 203 in Castello, 192 in San Marco, 140 in Dorsoduro, 113 in San Polo, 107 in Santa Croce and 36 on the Giudecca (Comune di Venezia, 2016). The count covers bars, restaurants, pizzerias and trattorie together, so it measures the whole trade rather than bacari alone, and it describes 2016 rather than today.

Bacari proper cluster more tightly than those totals suggest. The densest run sits around the Rialto market in San Polo, where the trade grew up serving the market and still opens early. Cannaregio has the longest evening stretch, along the fondamente north of the Strada Nova, which is where Venetians go once the centre fills. Dorsoduro concentrates around Campo Santa Margherita and the Zattere, with the university setting the hour. Castello thins out quickly east of the Arsenale. San Marco carries a high licence count with comparatively few bacari among it, most of its premises serving seated customers at table prices.