In the heart of La Serenissima, a millennium-old landmark has been transformed into an art-filled hotel that aims to rekindle the city’s avant-garde spirit.

Photographs by Christopher P. Hill

*Left to right*: A marble sculpture of the body of Christ in The Venice Venice’s water entrance; a view of the Rialto Bridge from the hotel.

Arriving at the hotel’s Grand Canal jetty via motoscafo (water taxi), you step through grate-like sliding doors into a dim chamber framed by ancient brickwork. Underfoot, slabs of Istrian stone rise from a shallow reflecting pool — an homage, I later learn, to the revered 20th-century Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. Near the foot of a candlelit stairway at the back of the room sits a marble Madonna. At first glance, the sculpture appears to be a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà — except in this rendition, by Fabio Viale, the body of Jesus is absent from his mother’s lap. It lies instead on a plinth of its own placed diagonally across the room, completing an arrangement that proclaims this to be unlike any other stay in Italy’s floating city.

Welcome to The Venice Venice Hotel (from US$600 a night), whose very name reflects the duality at play here. On the one hand, there’s its deeply historic roots: Ca’ da Mosto, the property’s Byzantine-style main building, is venerable even by Venetian standards. Located a short gondola ride from the Rialto Bridge, the former stone warehouse turned palazzo dates back a thousand years, making it the oldest structure on the Grand Canal. For generations it served as the home of the aristocratic da Mosto family; later, during the era of the Grand Tour, it became one of Europe’s first licensed hotels, hosting czars and princes and luminaries such as Voltaire and Shelley.

On the other hand, The Venice Venice, whose 43 guest rooms spill over into the adjacent Ca’ Dolfin, seeks to subvert (or at least respectfully disrupt) the city’s timeworn aesthetic in its embrace of what the owners call “postvenezianità,” or post-Venetianness. Forget baroque bedrooms swathed in damask wall coverings; the interiors here champion a fresh approach to Venetian design and craftsmanship, with a stripped-back look that showcases modern and contemporary artworks and twists on Italian midcentury furnishings. And the ancient sotoportego that runs under the Ca’ da Mosto to connect its rear courtyard with the canal is now Venice M’Art, a public space for shopping and dining that revives the passageway’s original purpose as a marketplace where people would come to mingle.

*Left to right*: The restored ceiling of the Venice Bitter Club; general manager Simone Cherin in the same space, which is entirely draped with a medieval-looking tapestry by a contemporary Italian artist.

This ambitious passion project was masterminded by Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo, the husband-and-wife design duo who founded the high-end cult sneaker brand Golden Goose. “We wanted to create a place where there could be a dialogue between the history of the city and the world of contemporary art,” explains Gallo, whose unruly salt-and-pepper beard and turned-back baseball cap convey more of a Venice Beach sensibility than one born of La Serenissima. (He actually hails from Mestre on the Venetian mainland.) “Venice was once the most avant-garde and influential city in the world, and I believe its soul still reflects this. Getting into fashion was one way for us to express our contemporary Venetian lifestyle, but it wasn’t enough. Through hospitality, we can share not only our passion for architecture, art, and design, but also food, music, and fun.”

After completing the acquisition of the palazzos in 2017, Gallo and Rinaldo embarked on a five-year restoration project, much of that spent shoring up the previously abandoned Ca’ da Mosto to keep it from collapsing into the canal. But while respect for the building’s heritage was always central to their vision, the resulting hotel is more closely aligned to the forward-looking spirit of the Venice Biennale, the art world’s preeminent exhibition. Indeed, the couple, avid art collectors over the past quarter century, curated the Venetian pavilion for the biennale’s 2019 edition.

At The Venice Venice, art — of which the hotel displays more than 300 pieces from the last century, according to general manager Simone Cherin — is not mere decoration. “Every single space was designed around the art,” Gallo says, “so each room represents a unique project.”

*Left to right*: One of The Venice Venice’s balconied rooms, with views of the Grand Canal; the palazzos of the hotel seen from across the Grand Canal.

Orchestrated by the owners themselves, often in collaboration with individual artists or gallerists, no two rooms are identical. One takes its cues from the New York loft-studio where Renato D’Agostin lived before returning to Venice in 2018. Apart from monochrome prints of his work, the photographer contributed one of his old analog cameras to the room; as a novel amenity, guests are welcome to snap off a roll and have the film personally developed by D’Agostin. Another split-level space is the Venice Suite, one of the city’s largest. It’s dedicated to the radical Arte Povera movement that blossomed in late-1960s Italy, with pieces including a massive iron panel by Jannis Kounellis.

In the hotel’s most recently completed section, one canal-side suite is the only one in Venice boasting direct boat access. Another incorporates an eerily lit indoor swimming pool. My own is No. 5, a corner room with pointed trefoil arches and a narrow balcony suspended above the canal. As you might expect, it’s supremely tasteful, with bespoke furnishings laid out under a high wooden ceiling alongside ephemera celebrating the late Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo. There’s an embossed leather dressing screen behind the bed and a mirrored wardrobe that beautifully accentuates the light streaming in from the brass-framed windows. The bathroom features a huge walk-in shower and soaking tub, as well as bath products (packaged in miniature aluminum cans and paint tubes) from in-house brand The Erose. And the views are breathtaking — a 180-degree sweep from the campanile of San Bartolomeo and Rialto Bridge, through to the old pescheria (fish market) and the baroque marble palace of Ca’ Pesaro. More than once, I popped open a beer from the complimentary minibar and sat out on my balcony to watch the steady stream of gondolas and vaporetti below.

The dialogue between classicism and contemporaneity suffuses the hotel’s public spaces as well, from the aforementioned water entrance to the small first-floor reception lobby, where a 16th-century plaster ceiling is held in place by deliberately exposed fixing bolts. A guests-only den called the Venice Bitter Club stands out for its carbon-fiber console bar and wall-to-wall tapestry by installation artist Francesco Simeti, all capped by an intricately coffered ceiling. Another of the hotel’s creative collaborators, Victoria Zidaru, designed the one-room spa, which doubles as an immersive installation of woven hemp tubes filled with fragrant herbs and flowers from the Romanian artist’s farm.

And of course, there’s Venice M’Art, the hotel’s very social sotoportego level, where you can buy art prints, art books, cool threads, The Erose–branded products, and even the bed throws and other artisanal objects found in the guest rooms. Toward the canal, the space morphs into a restaurant, its red-brick walls hung with candid black-and-white portraits of the kitchen’s fishmonger, greengrocer, butcher, and other local suppliers. Their ingredients make for some delicious meals. By day the menu is casual, with a selection of tasty cicchetti, the Venetian equivalent of tapas. In the evening, when the restaurant takes on a more glamorous vibe, primi might include gnocchi with Muscovy duck ragu, followed by red wine–braised veal cheek. When the weather is fine, the tables of choice are on the umbrellaed waterside terrace. I snag one as the setting summer sun casts its waning light over the Grand Canal. It seems the perfect spot to ponder the Venice of yesterday and tomorrow.

*Left to right*: The Venice Venice’s restaurant terrace; Venice M’Art merchandise.

This article originally appeared in the October/November 2024 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“A Vision for Venice”).

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