I am spending a week in Venice in November, to attend a music festival organised by a specialist travel agency. The concerts are held at various venues in the city. During my last visit I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time "getting lost", despite having several maps. Has anyone invented a Sat Nav yet, as I don't want to miss any of the concerts? Georgina Cooper, Northamptonshire

Sunday Times travel expert Richard Green responds: You aren't alone: getting lost in Venice is fabulously unavoidable, and finding an address is made ludicrously tricky by not usually having a street name: just a number and an area.

However, the locals are surprisingly helpful - especially if you avoid two of their biggest bugbears ­ always walk on the right hand side down narrow lanes, and don't stand by the exit for the entire vaporetti journey.

So be a model tourist, have your concert venue name to hand, and you are less likely to hear the classic Venetian fob-off of "sempre diritto" (straight ahead).

One clever company did trial a GPS-based audio-guided at this year's Carnivale. It sounds interesting, and worked rather like those museum audio guides ­ but in this case automatically triggered by your current position.

So it would be great for telling you some colour about where you, but not great to glean directions from. Still, the idea has at least been floated, so keep a look out in November.

Otherwise, the Azienda di Promozione Turistica have half a dozen tourist information offices around the city ­ at Piazza San Marco and Piazzale Roma for example, and staff there might be persuaded to annotate a map for you. You could have a stab yourself too, with a spot of Googling and Google Earthing ­ both of which cover Venice extremely well.

And for a map to buy, several of the guide book companies, produce very good large-scale maps to cities. You'll find Venice maps from Rough Guide (£4.99), Lonely Planet (£4.99), or Insight (£4.99).

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