ABOVE: A 44-foot (13.5m) Minuetto cabin cruiser in St. Mark's Basin, Venice.

Avid boaters, take note: You can enjoy a Venetian vacation without giving up a boating holiday. Thanks to Le Boat, you can rent a cabin cruiser in Precenicco or Casale (two riverside towns) and spend anywhere from one to several weeks exploring the inland waterways of Northern Italy--including the Venetian Lagoon and the islands around Venice. If you're pressed for time, you can skip Venice and enjoy a three- to five-night "Friuli Short Break" from Precenicco.

To make your trip planning easier, Le Boat has set up a number of cruise itineraries with recommended routes, activities, and cruising schedules. Each itinerary on Le Boat's Web site features a map, basic information (distance, cruising time, number of locks, and number of bridges), and illustrated descriptions of towns, villages, and resorts along the way.

Le Boat's cabin cruisers accommodate two to 12 passengers, and you can book a boat any time between mid-April and mid-October.

For more information, see the Italy pages at www.leboat.com.

Disclaimer: We haven't cruised with Le Boat (we've never piloted any boat larger than a canoe), but Le Boat claims to own and operate the largest fleet of self-drive cruisers on Europe's waterways, and the company has been in business for more than 40 years. You can read reviews from past renters on Le Boat's Web site.

Here are some more photos, courtesy of Le Boat:

ABOVE: Minuetto (interior)

ABOVE: Vision (exterior)

ABOVE: Vision (interior)

PHOTO: The new Venezia Unica card is a rebranded version of the imob.venezia card shown here. (If you have a valid imob.venezia card, you can have it "enabled" as a Venezia Unica card free of charge.)

If you're a regular visitor to Venice, you probably know that the imob.venezia stored-value transit card has offered huge discounts on public transportation for the last several years. "Cartavenezia" fares, which have been available only to imob.venezia cardholders, are a fraction of the single-fare and Tourist Travel Card rates that most visitors pay.

The discounted fares are still available, but the stored-value card is now called the "Venezia Unica city pass," and it offers a few more features than the old imob.venezia version did. (Probably the most important feature for non-residents is the ability to recharge the card with fares online.)

For more information, see our Venezia Unica city pass article at Veniceforvisitors.com.