Canaletto dreaming

It was a vision of impossible exoticism – ornate stone warehouses and delicate Byzantine palazzo rising from a wide avenue of shining water, buzzing with working boats transporting the luxury trade goods that made Venice the wealthiest and most influential city in the world for over 500 years.

I was afraid to visit because I’d read the news. Modern Venice had become an overcrowded fetishised parody of itself. The once-grand palazzo were sinking under their own weight, their exteriors crumbling, and the city was now a smelly, overpriced cliché.

But I had to visit, just once. So my wife and I booked for October to see the end of the Venice Biennale when the nights were cooler and after the rush of peak season and hordes of tourists.

The world’s most famous contemporary art show was brilliant, but I didn’t expect our hotel to leave us with even deeper lasting impressions.

No ordinary hotel

A grand entrance

You arrive at the Venice Venice Hotel’s Grand Canal entrance by boat. The entrance doors sit beside the restaurant terrace, the only place in Venice you can eat without a guard rail beside the Grand Canal, watching the constant traffic of barges, elegant wooden water taxis and gondolas.

The light is dimmed, you pause to let your eyes adjust and the doors close behind you. Underfoot are slabs of polished stone at different levels, separated by water. It’s eerily quiet, and the air temperature suddenly cools so it’s sharp on your bare arms.

The space is quiet, and you immediately notice a familiar white marble sculpture. You know it, but it doesn’t belong here. It’s a replica of Michelangelo’s masterpiece La Pietá from St Peter’s in Rome. The original is the ultimate work by the renaissance master, a homage to a mother’s love, Mary heartbroken as she cradles a dead Jesus in her arms.

But this Pietá is different. Jesus is gone. Her arms are empty and she looks down at a rough-hewn space from whence the Saviour of the World has been wrenched. As your eyes adjust, you scan across the space. You realise Jesus is there, sculpted in white marble like the original, but deliberately placed apart. Jesus is lying alone in a pool of water on the other side of the foyer.

It’s a work by contemporary Italian sculptor Fabio Viale. He sculpts using the same techniques as Michelangelo, with chisels and his bare hands. He first showed his Pietá without Christ in 2018 at the Venice Biennale, with a naked African man, a Catholic religious refugee from Nigeria named Lucky Ehi lying naked in the arms of Mary. Alessandro Gallo was so moved by the work he bought it and designed the entrance of his Venice Venice Hotel to share it with his guests.

It must be the most unnerving entrance experience of any hotel in the world. Conrad Hilton would be confounded. This isn’t a space trying to impress us with glamour and opulence. It’s a direct confrontation to all that, a challenge to us, the privileged, to change the way we think. Postvenezianità expressed
as a hotel lobby.

Restoring Venetian history

The hotel opened in 2022 following a five-year restoration and redesign of a 13th century palazzo that embodies Venice’s rich history like few others.

The building, Ca’ da Mosto, began life as Venice’s first stone warehouse 900 years ago, a single-storey trading warehouse for the renowned da Mosto merchant family. In the 16th century, at the apogee of Venetian wealth and power, two grand additional floors were added. In the 19th century, another floor was added and the building became the most celebrated hotel in Europe – the Leon Bianco – playing host to czars, emperors, artists, poets and writers.

Then, some time early in the 20th century, the building fell into chronic disrepair. Its foundations slumped, the basement flooded and it was divided into multiple crumbling apartments before it was finally abandoned.

Most of the walls are original and the new reinforced concrete floors on each level follow their rolling contours. In some places, 900-year-old bricks are exposed. Where the original plaster of a 16th century ceiling is held in place by fixing bolts, they’re left on display so the line between new and old is clear.

Where new elements have been added, it’s clearly the craft of contemporary artisans – from the rough carved marble dado rails laid on ancient bricks to hand-blown Murano glass light shades and the hotel’s custom-made ceramics. The building feels modern but old at the same time. Throughout the hotel are works of leading contemporary European artists, all of whom offer a twist to classic techniques like Fabio Viale. Each room is dedicated to an individual artist and contains several original works. You can also buy designer-distressed Golden Goose sneakers in the shop. Clearly it’s easier to sell your sneaker company than it is to stop selling your sneakers.    

Or perhaps the sneakers offer a window into what the owners are trying to achieve here. Brand-new Golden Goose sneakers get more street cred through the designer distress process. Similarly, the contemporary art and design elements of the Venice Venice Hotel are empowered with 900 years of history because the old building shows through, like scuffs on a sneaker.

Accessible luxury

There’s a lot that makes Venice Venice Hotel remarkable, but most surprising is the accessibility of it all. Most of the world’s exotic hotels are designed to be off limits to anyone except their rich paying guests. But Venice Venice Hotel, true to its manifesto, opens its arms to anyone to spend a day there.

Throughout the hotel’s public spaces was a constant smattering of 20-somethings on laptops. Who knows why they were there, but they did have the look of young people being creative. They certainly weren’t ordering lavish platters from the restaurant. I’m told their policy is never to kick anyone out for not buying anything. I guess there’s a tacit promise that while you’re at the Venice Venice you’re imagining a better world.

Canaletto window scene

When we made it to our room on the first floor, there was one final unexpected moment. The rooms are, of course, beautiful, but it wasn’t the interior that caught my breath when we opened the window and looked out onto the Grand Canal.

I knew every inch of the view. Canaletto had been there before in 1730 painting a picture I first saw when I was 19. Looking out at a scene that really hasn’t changed for 400 years, I wondered, if Canaletto was around today, what kind of art he’d make and what brand of sneakers he’d wear.