The Gritti Palace – the Doge's palazzo now holding Two MICHELIN Keys

Across the Grand Canal from the swell of Santa Maria della Salute stands a Gothic palazzo that was redesigned in Venetian Gothic style for the Pisani family in 1475; fifty years later it became the private residence of Doge Andrea Gritti, the Republic's ruler from 1523 to 1538 after a distinguished diplomatic and military career that included negotiating peace with the Ottoman Empire. The house passed through noble hands and, by some accounts, served as the residence of the Vatican's ambassadors to Venice, before opening as a hotel in 1895 and being bought in 1947 by CIGA, the hotel group from which today's Luxury Collection brand descends. A fifteen-month restoration reopened it in March 2013, its 61 rooms and 21 suites dressed in Rubelli fabrics, Murano glass and hand-carved Girandole mirrors. The MICHELIN Guide now rates The Gritti Palace Two Keys, its mark of an exceptional stay, and a guest book running from Churchill to Hemingway explains why travellers have never really stopped checking in.

01The house

The canal facade once carried frescoes by Giorgione, long since lost, and a second facade facing the Campo Santa Maria del Giglio was added in the sixteenth century. It remained a private residence into the nineteenth century, when John Ruskin and his wife Effie lodged here while he wrote The Stones of Venice.

CIGA, the Compagnia Italiana Grandi Alberghi founded in 1906, built its name on grand Italian hotels such as this one; Prince Karim Aga Khan took control of the group in 1985, and when Starwood Hotels acquired it in 1994 the Gritti became a founding address of The Luxury Collection.

02Rooms and suites

Sixty-one rooms and twenty-one suites fill the piano nobile and the floors above, each finished in Venetian tapestries and velvets, archival Rubelli fabrics, hand-carved Girandole mirrors and Murano glass chandeliers restored or reproduced during the 2013 renovation. Ten signature suites are named after the guests and institutions that shaped the house — Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Ruskin, Peggy Guggenheim — or after city landmarks such as Punta della Dogana and La Fenice.

Insider tip

Reached by water taxi or on foot from Piazza San Marco, five minutes from La Fenice.

The most theatrical of them, the two-storey Redentore Suite, has the hotel's largest rooftop terrace, looking over the Grand Canal towards the Giudecca and the southern lagoon — a vantage once used to watch the fireworks of the Redentore festival that gives the suite its name.

03Where to eat

Club del Doge Restaurant sits at the water-level corner of the palazzo, its kitchen led by Executive Chef Alberto Fol, whose cooking draws equally on the lagoon and the Dolomites — his signature Scallops alla Cacciatora unites both in a single dish. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served daily, with a separate, more informal lunch menu built around shared plates and seafood.

From April to October, tables move onto the floating Gritti Terrace, inches from the water, for a lighter seasonal menu. Since 1975, the hotel's open kitchen has doubled as the Gritti Epicurean School, hosting the city's social elite and international guests for wine tastings and cooking workshops — a tradition Chef Fol now continues with Rialto Market tours, chef's-table dinners and tastings led by Head Sommelier Sandro Chinellato.

04The bar

Bar Longhi takes its name from the Venetian painter and is set behind green marble and an antique mirrored interior that still looks much as it did when Hemingway, a regular guest through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, ordered his dry martini from a dedicated trolley — Bar Manager Cristiano Luciani now wheels out his own variation, made with wild fennel.

Outside, the Riva Lounge spills onto a Grand Canal terrace fitted out like the deck of a 1930s Italian motor yacht, polished wood and stainless steel underfoot, and is the address of choice for a sunset Bellini before dinner.

05Spa and wellbeing

The Gritti SPA, run with Sisley Paris, occupies three treatment suites offering Phyto-Aromatic treatments that combine massage techniques from several continents with the brand's plant-based aromatherapy. A small fitness suite, open to hotel guests only, completes the wellbeing offer for those who would rather walk off a plate of fritto misto along the nearby Zattere.

06The neighbourhood

The hotel stands in San Marco, facing the Punta della Dogana and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection across the water, with the dome of Santa Maria della Salute filling the view from its terraces. La Fenice opera house is a five-minute walk away and St Mark's Square barely a thousand feet further, reached past the antiques shops of Campo Santa Maria del Giglio.

The guest list over a century and a half reads like a roll call of anyone who mattered in Venice — Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly among them — all drawn, as Somerset Maugham once observed, by the sight of the sun setting over the Salute from the hotel's own terrace.

07Making the most of a stay

From April to September, the hotel's own Aquariva speedboat, Il Doge, runs tailored excursions to Torcello and the northern lagoon. Concierges also lead a thirty-minute Destination Discoveries tour through the hotel's own art collection, assembled across more than five centuries as a private palazzo and, since 1895, as a hotel.

From April 2026, guests are exempt from Venice's new visitor access fee, though proof of booking should be kept to hand. By law governing the city's historic palaces, rooms come without kettles or irons — ask instead for room-service coffee or the pressing service.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.