The Gritti Palace
Where Hemingway drank, Ruskin wrote, and Venice looks its best
Back in 1525, Andrea Gritti, Doge of Venice and one of the most politically formidable men in Renaissance Europe, moved his household into a 15th-century Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. It has remained suitably palatial since then.
The Gritti Palace’s credentials as a haunt for wordsmiths began when English writer John Ruskin called the palace home while writing The Stones of Venice. Somerset Maugham also took a room here during the same era. This is well before the private residence was converted into a hotel in 1895. Both now have suites named in their honour, which is either tribute or provocation, depending on your view of the literary canon.
Half a century later, Ernest Hemingway came to stay, intending to write. The novel he produced at the Gritti, Across the River and Into the Trees, was one of his least-well-received works. Maybe the view and noise of the Grand Canal was too distracting. The critical mauling it received spurred him to respond with The Old Man and the Sea, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also, at some point during all of this, and according to hotel lore, described the Gritti as "the best hotel in a city of great hotels.”
The hotel you’ll experience today has 61 rooms and 21 suites, each individually designed using Rubelli fabrics, Murano glass chandeliers, antique furnishings, and Venetian tapestries. You can’t host a hotel in a former palace and not go the whole hog on design, especially in Italy.
Alongside the ‘standard’ rooms, you can pay a considerable amount more to elevate your Venice stay – and sleep among the legends. The Hemingway Suite spans 90 square metres with floor-to-ceiling French doors opening directly onto the Grand Canal.
The La Fenice Suite contains a harpsichord made in Sorrento in 1704, alongside signed letters from both Verdi and Puccini. And at the top of the building, the two-storey Redentore Suite opens onto a 250-square-metre private rooftop terrace with a spa pool and panoramic views across the lagoon.
Dinner is served in Club del Doge, the hotel's formal restaurant, which holds a Guida Identità Golose listing. But for a slightly different experience, try the Gritti Epicurean School, which runs hands-on Venetian cooking workshops led by the executive chef. Ask at reception.
One of the hotel’s best hidden corners is the Explorer's Library, which has rare books, antiques, and travel curiosities to muse at as you sip something cold, including of course all the works by the writers who once resided here.
In terms of location, it doesn’t really get better than this in Venice. The Gritti sits between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, and under ten minutes on foot from Piazza San Marco. There’s even a private water taxi pier connecting to Marco Polo Airport, so you can arrive and leave in style. The address places you inside Venice, rather than alongside it.
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