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Buying Guides
Venice on 1000 Pieces: Ravensburger or Clementoni?
The short answer
We currently stock five 1000 piece Venice puzzles: four from Ravensburger at $39.99 and one from Clementoni at $29.95. The gap is real and it is mostly the cut. Ravensburger cut every piece in a 1000 piece puzzle to a different shape, so a wrong piece will not seat convincingly, and their board is thicker. Clementoni print more saturated colour and cost a third less. For a hard image, take the Ravensburger. For a first Venice, or a gift, the Clementoni is the better buy and we do not think you are compromising.
Venice is the most puzzled city on earth, and we hold five different versions of it in 1000 pieces right now. Four are Ravensburger at $39.99. One is Clementoni at $29.95. Same city, same piece count, a third more money.
That gap is the interesting part, so this page is mostly about what it buys you, and where we think it is not worth paying.
On this page
The five Venices we hold
Every one of these is 1000 pieces, so the only variables are the brand, the picture and the price.
| Puzzle | Brand | Price | The image |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lighting Venice | Clementoni | $29.95 | Night, artificial light on water, the most colour-saturated of the five |
| Venice Romance | Ravensburger | $39.99 | The postcard Venice, gondolas and warm stone |
| Autumn in Venice | Ravensburger | $39.99 | Autumn palette, the friendliest of the four to build |
| The Canals of Venice | Ravensburger | $39.99 | Water and stone repeating, the one we rate hardest |
| Burano, Italy | Ravensburger | $39.99 | Not the city at all, see below |
Stock is small and real. These are single-figure quantities sitting on a shelf in Sydney, not a dropship listing. If one sells out the page stays up and you can ask to be told when it returns.
What the extra $10 actually buys
Not the picture. The picture is a matter of taste and the Clementoni is, if anything, the more striking image of the five.
What you are paying Ravensburger for is the cut.
$39.99
Ravensburger
German family firm, founded in Ravensburg in 1883, puzzles still made in Germany. No two pieces in a 1000 piece puzzle share the same shape, so a wrong piece will not sit convincingly. Thick laminated board with a linen anti-glare finish.
$29.95
Clementoni
Italian family firm, founded in Recanati in 1963, an educational toy maker that also makes puzzles. Made in Italy, linen finish, and printing that runs more saturated than the German brands. The fit is good, just less emphatic.
The practical difference shows up in one moment: you have a piece that looks like it belongs and you are not sure. On a Ravensburger it either goes in or it does not, and you move on. On a softer cut you sometimes push a piece home, build outward from it, and find the error twenty minutes later.
How much that matters depends entirely on the image. On a picture with strong colour zones it almost never comes up. On a picture with a thousand pieces of grey water, it comes up constantly, and it is the difference between an evening you enjoyed and an evening you endured.
Do not read this as "Clementoni is the budget one". It is a third cheaper because it is made by a larger company with a broader range, not because the board is thin or the print is poor. Our full comparison of the two is in the Clementoni guide.
Which one we rate hardest
The Canals of Venice, comfortably, and for a reason worth understanding before you buy it.
Venice is a difficult subject for a jigsaw because the city is largely two materials, water and pale stone, and both repeat. A canal image can hand you two hundred pieces that are all the same three colours in the same proportion. There is nothing wrong with the puzzle. The city is simply built that way.
Ranked hardest to easiest, and this is our opinion rather than a measurement:
- The Canals of Venice. Repeating water and stonework across most of the frame.
- Lighting Venice. Night image, so the dark areas are large, but the artificial light gives you far more to hold on to than daylight on stone does.
- Venice Romance. The classic view, with enough architectural detail to sort by.
- Burano, Italy. Blocks of flat bright colour, which sounds easy and is not, because the blocks are large and flat.
- Autumn in Venice. The autumn palette splits the picture into obvious zones. The friendliest of the five.
If this is a gift and you do not know the person's tolerance, Autumn in Venice or Lighting Venice. The Canals of Venice is a puzzle for somebody who has said out loud that they want a hard one.
The one that is not really Venice
Burano is not the city. It is a small island out in the Venetian lagoon, a boat ride north, and its houses are painted in blocks of saturated colour, reds and greens and blues sitting directly against each other. The story locals tell is that the colours let fishermen find their own house through the lagoon fog.
It is in this list because it is sold as Venice and shares a lagoon with it. It builds like a completely different puzzle. Where the canal images are an exercise in tonal patience, Burano is an exercise in large flat colour fields, which is a different kind of hard and a much better fit for anyone who finds grey water tedious.
It is the one people do not expect to end up liking most.
Why Venice keeps being made
It is worth asking why a city of 50,000 people has more 1000 piece puzzles made of it than most countries.
Part of it is simply that Venice photographs well from the height a person stands at. Most famous cityscapes need altitude, a drone or a tower, and the result is a picture of roofs. Venice works at eye level from a boat, which is the same angle a puzzler is looking at the finished picture from.
Part of it is that the city is unusually legible in colour. Warm stone above, green water below, and a horizon line that a puzzle maker can rely on. That is a gift to a manufacturer choosing images that will sell, even though it is precisely what makes the resulting puzzle harder to build than it looks.
And part of it is that Venice is one of the few subjects where a customer can own several without feeling they have bought the same thing twice. The five on this page are genuinely five different experiences, which is not true of, say, five puzzles of the Eiffel Tower.
How to build a canal image without losing your evening. Do not sort by colour, because on these images the colour is nearly all the same. Sort by edge shape and by texture direction instead: the ripple on water runs horizontally, the stonework runs vertically, and the reflections sit between the two. It is the single change that turns The Canals of Venice from a grind into a puzzle.
Which one to pick
The short version
- Best first Venice
- Lighting Venice, Clementoni, $29.95
- Best gift
- Autumn in Venice, Ravensburger
- Hardest, in our view
- The Canals of Venice, Ravensburger
- The surprise
- Burano, Italy, Ravensburger
- Best value
- Clementoni, and it is not close on price
Our honest position is that the brand argument is usually louder than it deserves to be. The cut matters most on a punishing image and least on a forgiving one, so the sensible rule is to spend the extra $10 where the picture is going to punish you and save it where it will not.
Why we stock both
It would be simpler to carry one brand of Venice and tell everyone it is the right one. I stock both because the honest answer changes depending on who is asking. Somebody buying their first 1000 piece puzzle in ten years does not need a German die cut, they need a picture they want to look at for a fortnight. Somebody who finishes a hard puzzle most months will notice the cut on the very first false fit and never forgive the saving. Selling both, and saying which is which, is the only version of this I am comfortable with.
Cities and landmarks, everything we currently hold
Shop Cities & Landmarks
Venice, Burano, London, New York and the rest. Real stock on a shelf in Sydney, and free shipping Australia wide over $150.
Now tell us we are wrong
This page is one shop's opinion, and the ranking above is a judgement rather than a measurement.
If you have built any of these five, use the comments and settle it. Which Venice did you enjoy, which one did you give up on, and is the German cut actually worth $10 to you? We are far more interested in the disagreement than the agreement, and the argument itself is the useful part of the page for the next person deciding.
Related reading
- The Complete Guide to Ravensburger Puzzles, what Softclick means and what the board is made of
- The Complete Guide to Clementoni Puzzles, the Italian side of this argument in full
- The Complete Guide to Puzzle Piece Counts, why 1000 is the number almost everything is made in
- The Puzzle Library, everything we have written
Common questions
Which Venice puzzle is the hardest?
Of the five we hold, we rate The Canals of Venice hardest, because water and stone repeat across large parts of the image with very little colour to separate them. Autumn in Venice is the easiest of the four Ravensburgers, since the autumn palette breaks the picture into obvious zones. - q: Is the Clementoni as good as the Ravensburger? a: > Not identical, and the difference is in the cut rather than the picture. Ravensburger's fit is more positive, so you get less second-guessing about whether a piece is genuinely in. Clementoni's printing is arguably more vivid. At a third less money, most puzzlers would take that trade, and we stock both precisely because the answer is not the same for everybody. - q: Is Burano the same thing as Venice? a: > Not quite, and it is the reason that puzzle surprises people. Burano is a small island in the Venetian lagoon, north of the city itself, and its houses are painted in blocks of bright colour. It photographs nothing like the canals, so it builds nothing like them either. - q: How long does a 1000 piece Venice puzzle take? a: > Most adults finish a 1000 piece puzzle across several sittings rather than one. The canal images sit at the harder end because of the repeated water and stonework. We are collecting real completion times from Australian puzzlers rather than guessing, so this answer will be replaced with measured numbers rather than a range we made up.
Before you buy another one
There are four kinds of puzzler. Most people know which they are within two questions.
Seven questions, about two minutes. You get your type, the range that actually suits it, and the shadow: the thing your type gets wrong. That last part is the one people tell me is uncomfortably accurate.
Find out what you areNo charge, no catch. It takes longer to read this paragraph than to answer the first question.
Sources and further reading
Last reviewed and updated 2 September 2026 by Michael, Owner, Premium Puzzles. We keep this page current as the range and the market change, rather than letting it age as a dated post.
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