The best hotels in Venice
It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is nowhere like Venice, this city of more than 100 islands casting a spell on every visit. It can be busy (and in primetime summer, suffocatingly so) but wander after dark and you might find yourself on a deserted stone bridge, light from the streetlamps rippling across the water, basilicas rising out of nowhere, each one a masterpiece, beside a tiny trattoria no one has mentioned.
Hotels and pensiones pop up at every turn: here we intermix the most iconic and enduring with hideaways offering a sense of discovery – each one a salve to the heady hullabaloo of the streets and waterways outside.
How we chose the best hotels in Venice
As is our passion, we place focus on design within our best hotel edits, and we try to include a range of styles and price points. Experiencing the destination’s culture is a top priority and setting, as well as locally inspired touches, are taken into account. Whether you’re travelling solo, with one other person or as part of a multi-generational group, these are the best hotels in Venice in 2024.
The best hotels in Venice
All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
- Hotel Cipriani</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"667162d4e29d0b7088e1a2cb","index":0,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
1/8Hotel Cipriani
This much-loved Venetian institution needs little introduction: opened by Giuseppe Cipriani (of Harry’s Bar), the ultra-glamorous pink hotel has been welcoming film stars, fashion designers, statesmen and luminaries since 1958.
It sits proudly on the eastern tip of Giudecca, a five-minute spin in a chic wooden launch from Piazza San Marco (the hotel runs this private service 24/7). The payoff is three acres of gardens planted with blooms, vegetables and grapevines, a red-clay tennis court and – the Cipriani’s crowning glory – a vast saltwater swimming pool, originally designed in feet but built by happy accident in metres, with views to San Giorgio Maggiore. For this summer, the private cabanas have been revamped in Rubelli fabrics, there are new chefs (Massimo Bottura and Vania Ghedini) at the Michelin-starred restaurant, and many of the hotel’s 96 rooms have been refreshed over recent years; the service, led by fabulous manager Barbara, is always excellent. But it is not the tweaks and seasonal titillations that allow the Cipriani to endure – rather it is the heavenly balm it provides to the bustle and clamour across the water.
- Hotel il Palazzo Experimental</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"66715ff71beb831a1afdb354","index":1,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
MR.TRIPPER2/8Hotel il Palazzo Experimental
This is the cool one, the one that feels a little disheveled – a picture not quite straight, a curtain still drawn – as if it had a good party last night and is suffering from a mild hangover. A party vibe is unsurprising, as this 32-room hotel comes from the childhood friends who launched Experimental Cocktail Club in Paris in 2007, adding to their portfolio speakeasies, members clubs and hotels in London, New York, Ibiza, Biarritz, Menorca (their hometown), the Cotswolds (taking over Cowley Manor) and a chalet in Verbier.
Conversely, this former Renaissance palazzo is positioned on the Giudecca Canal in Dorsoduro, a quiet-ish neighbourhood a step away from the throng (and yet the Accademia bridge is just over five minutes on foot; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is eight minutes).
The calm Art Deco curves, pale-pink painted walls, exposed beams, terrazzo marble floors and scatterings of bold stripes are the hand of Dorothée Meilichzon (prolific Parisian interior designer and wife of one of the founders). The restaurant is fun, with an open kitchen, and the intimate bar (antiqued mirror doors, vivid orange walls, twisted red laquer) a popular nightcap spot open unusually late for Venice, serving the requisite experimental and classic cocktails. The terrace outside the front overlooks the canal to the red-brick 1921 Fortuny factory on Giudecca directly across the water (if you can see past the mega yacht often moored in front of the hotel) but the piece de resistance is the fabulous private garden, currently peppered with sculptures for the Biennale. Here tables and chairs hide among trees and hedges that lead to an open terrace on Rio Dorsoduro and Chiesa di Ognissanti, a very quiet snapshot of real Venetian life.
- Oltre il Giardino</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"6671600b1f930ce5688958b5","index":2,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
.jpg)
3/8Oltre il Giardino
With just six rooms, this small country villa and magical garden at the very heart of historic Venice was bought in the 1920s by the composer Gustav Mahler’s wife Alma. Now owned and run by the Muner family, this boutique hotel feels like a private home, the simple, spacious rooms are flooded with light and filled with the family’s pictures and furniture.
It is positioned on the quiet Rio de San Stin, a discreet door in the wall leading straight into a peaceful and highly coveted oasis of olive and magnolia trees. There is no restaurant, but homemade breakfast is served in the garden (or the sitting room in winter) and there are plenty of places to eat and drink in the surrounding residential streets of San Polo, its campo the second biggest in Venice after Piazza San Marco.
- Violino d'Oro</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"6671601ce29d0b7088e1a2c9","index":3,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
4/8Violino d'Oro
New in December, this 32-room boutique hotel sits right on the Rio de San Moisè, a two-minute stroll past the stunning Baroque San Moisè basilica from San Marco. Part of Collezione Em (a family-owned Florentine hotel group with a property in Florence and two in Forte dei Marmi), it feels like a fresh and well-appointed Venetian home filled with furniture and artworks by local artists and makers; the mosaic terrazzo marble flooring was hand-laid by the 85-year-old patriarch of a storied family of Venetian artisans.
Room design is very clean: creams and whites with dark-green striped silk curtains and mosaic-pattern rugs; a bathroom with Toile-papered doors; Murano coloured-glass chandeliers. The intimate restaurant serving Venetian-Florentine food has just eight tables overlooking the quiet Corte Barozzi and the drawing room has doors onto the river, so guests can arrive by private boat or gondola.
- Cima Rosa</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"667160561f930ce5688958b7","index":4,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
MILDA BEND photo5/8Cima Rosa
In quiet Santa Croce, three vaporetto stops along the Grand Canal from Sant Lucia train station, Cima Rosa is a charming B&B with just five rooms in a private palazzo belonging to the Luzzatti family. Alight at the 11th-century baroque San Stae basilica and wiggle down a narrow alleyway towards a classical stone arch with wrought-iron gates tangled in greenery before stepping into a delightful courtyard, jasmine climbing the peach-painted walls, a beautiful stone well at the centre and classical statues tucked amidst the foliage.
The palazzo doors lead into a lantern-lit and very atmospheric androne, with steps at the back straight onto the Grand Canal, allowing for arrivals by private water taxi or gondola. Three other families have apartments in the building: Cima Rosa occupies the first two floors, with two bedrooms above a cosy sitting room filled with antique mahogany furniture and books; the others (with views over the Grand Canal) are across the androne and up the sweeping stone staircase. Breakfast is fresh bread from the local bakery, cheese, ham and speck from one of the few remaining neighborhood delis, fresh eggs from the foothills of the Dolomites, and a daily special (ricotta pancakes with berries, perhaps). In the afternoons, guests can help themselves to fresh cakes and loose-leaf teas from Florentine company La Via del Te – every detail and layer here is the handiwork of owner Brittany Vallot and her Venetian architect husband Daniele.
- The Gritti Palace</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"6671605f1beb831a1afdb356","index":5,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
6/8The Gritti Palace
The Gritti remains the best address in Venice, its quiet, unflashy grandeur woven into the fabric of this former doge’s palace over the decades, a scene-stealer yet beguilingly warm and unpretentious.
Step straight off the Grand Canal or charming Campo Santa Maria del Giglio to find terrazzo marble floors, Murano glass chandeliers and rare archive Rubelli silk walls – all ripped up in 2013 to improve the hotel’s flood defences and then painstakingly replaced and restored. The cosy Explorer’s Library draws you in with a Titian portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti accompanied by velvet sofas, Rococo chaises, tapestries, charmingly worn wool rugs and lots of books. Black and white photos of scores of illustrious guests line the hallways, leading to lifts with inlaid wooden walls that sweep upwards from the Sisley spa to the 82 rooms and suites, each one individually elegant.
Both the restaurant and bar are especially romantic, the latter a dusky and glamorous gilt and dark-green marble jewel box of vetrate a piombo glass windows and antique Venetian mirrors spilling onto the art deco Riva Terrace (the hotel Riva moored alongside, ready to whisk into the lagoon). A peach bellini (clichéd but simply delicious here, made with tangerines when white peaches are not in season) or dinner on the expansive restaurant terrace is one of life's better moments, the sun setting pink over the Grand Canal.
Many guests come and go by private water taxi straight from the front door, but there is a vaporetto stop in the lovely del Giglio square and a gondola station outside the hotel doors, ideal for a €2 hop across the canal to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opposite. San Marco is under 10 minutes on foot.
- Aman","brand":{"name":""},"id":"667160a01f930ce5688958bb","index":6,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
Robert Rieger7/8Aman
Rub shoulders with Venetian nobility at the beautiful Palazzo Papadopoli – one of Venice’s eight palazzi monumentali, situated on the Grand Canal five minutes from the Rialto bridge – where Count Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga and his family have lived for over 200 years. The Arrivabene’s still live across the top floor, leasing the rest of the building and its gardens to Adrian Zecha of Aman, who called in longtime collaborator Jean-Michel Gathy to carefully craft 24 rooms and suites amidst the Rococo richness, Tiepolo frescoes and gold putti. His footprint is pleasingly faint (there is no check-in desk or hotel lobby), somehow melding a 21st-century hotel with the ageing splendour of a 16th-century Renaissance palace immortalised by Turner.
- Ca’ di Dio</a>","brand":{"name":""},"id":"667160a01beb831a1afdb358","index":7,"contentType":"photo","offers":[],"component":"gallery_slide_component"}" data-testid="GallerySlideWrapper">
8/8Ca’ di Dio
In Castello on the fringes of Arsenale, Venice’s contemporary art district on the far side of Piazza San Marco, this 66-room Patricia Urquiola-designed hotel is perfectly positioned for the Biennale (until 24 November), the pavilions of the Giardini and revamped naval dockyard just a short stroll away.
Given its name means House of God, the sprawling former monastery is a fitting retreat from the Venice hustle. Positioned on the waterfront Riva between the Rio Ca’ di Dio and Rio dell’Arsenale, views from the front are of the lagoon and Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, whilst the three courtyards within conceal mulberry trees, flowers, original stone wells and a kitchen garden.
Walk through the lobby – a former chapel, with classical statuary and a glass sail chandelier of 14,000 Murano crystals – to find rooms still a smidge monastic but softened by smoked mirrors, Rubelli wallpapers and cosseting Molteni furniture, Urquiola imbuing typical Venetian tropes of bespoke Murano glass lighting, marble bathrooms and hand-laid terrazzo flooring with characteristic tactility.
The hotel is well placed for exploring the lagoon’s islands – with private tours of Murano, Burano et al on offer – whilst Castello’s tangle of small streets promises great off-grid places to eat, cocktail and shop.
