Campiello Traghetto, 2467, 30124 Venice VE, Italy
The first owners from the Pizani family built it in the 15th century around earlier buildings already present on the site, and today, if you look at the Gothic facade from the canal side, you can see that it is slightly asymmetrical. After the Pizani, the palazzo passed into the hands of the Gritti family, one of whose members was a doge, but by the late 19th century, they also sold their residence, and a hotel opened here, changing hands several times.
Over six hundred years, nothing remains of the original 15th-century interiors except the walls, some preserved painted wooden beams, and memories that the building’s facade was once decorated with frescoes by Giorgione.
At the same time, most of the building was completely rebuilt — the rooms became more spacious, and the number of rooms was reduced to eighty-two, including ten “named” themed suites dedicated to Venetian landmarks, former owners of the palazzo, and famous hotel guests, whose autographs appear in the golden guestbook, including members of the British royal family, the Princess of Monaco, director Woody Allen, and many others. The hotel is also famous for being a favorite haunt of Ernest Hemingway.
The room furnishings partly consist of restored furniture from the previous interior (the hotel was last renovated in the 1980s) and items made by Venetian craftsmen. So alongside the “Pizani,” “Punta della Dogana,” and “Ernest Hemingway” rooms, with interiors in the style of lavish Venetian Rococo, the hotel also has rooms that refer to entirely different eras and styles.
One suite is named after Peggy Guggenheim, who celebrated her eightieth birthday at the palazzo in 1978 — the windows offer a view of the museum named after her, the bookshelf holds a collection of art albums, and the walls display works by Picasso and Miró.
The interior of the “Somerset Maugham” room (Maugham also lived in the hotel for extended periods) is inspired by the style of the writer’s wife, decorator Syrie Wellcome. The “La Fenice” room features Empire-style furnishings and a collection of opera recordings.
The “Angelo Donghia” suite, with furniture designed by the American designer in the 1970s, also has a musical theme. It houses a restored Bang & Olufsen stereo system and a collection of disco-style records. Plus, there is a cocktail bar for hosting dance parties.
Currently, the presidential suite at The Gritti Palace bears the name of Ernest Hemingway and contains the writer’s own club chair.
The Gritti Palace was Ernest Hemingway’s home from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. He stayed on the third floor, in a room overlooking the Grand Canal, the gondolas, and the ever-hungry seagulls. He wrote many chapters of the novel “Across the River and into the Trees” here — an autobiographical novel where the hero is a fifty-year-old man and the heroine is his beloved nineteen-year-old girl.
And it was here that this love story happened, right on the terrace of the Gritti Palace hotel in the late 1940s: Papa (as everyone who knew Hemingway called him) was sitting at the bar, with a glass of whiskey and a bottle of soda on the table. Adriana entered, and he smiled. He was fifty-two, she was nineteen. She became his last love, his muse; meeting her, he began writing again after many years of hiatus, freely and easily. He was Ernest Hemingway, she was Adriana Ivancich, an aristocrat from an old Dalmatian family, daughter of a general who served under Mussolini.
This story also involved Ernest’s wife, Mary, who was willing to tolerate her husband’s affair as long as he kept writing; and Adriana’s mother, Dora, whose joy knew no bounds — her daughter had a wealthy and famous lover. Ernest often gathered them all at the Gritti bar for lunch or a drink.
In January 1954, sitting at one of the tables and sipping his favorite “Bellini,” he read an obituary about himself in the New York Daily Mirror (after a plane crash in Africa, the writer was presumed dead, though in fact he was seriously injured). But even this unpleasant news could not spoil old Hem’s impression of the fantastic city on the water, and admiring the stunning view of the Grand Canal from the terrace, he called the Gritti Palace “the best of the city’s magnificent hotels.”
Somerset Maugham visited The Gritti Palace every summer. “There are few things in life more pleasant than sitting on the Gritti terrace when the sun, about to set, floods the beautiful Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, which almost faces you,” the author wrote back in 1960.
“You are not just a room, like in those huge caravanserais now being built all over the world,” Maugham wrote. “You are a friend who is greeted as soon as he steps off his motorboat, and when you sit down to dinner at the very same table you sat at a year ago, and the year before, and you see that your bottle of Soave is already in the ice bucket waiting for you, so, since this happens year after year, you cannot help but feel at home.”
Sources:
https://prohotel.ru/review-104955/0/
https://www.admagazine.ru/travels/otel-the-gritti-palace-v-venecii
https://www.gq.ru/travels/oteli-i-znamenitosti-pod-odnoj-kryshej-s-legendoj
