The Gritti Palace, A Luxury Collection Hotel

"Doge's palace turned hotel, Riva Lounge on the Grand Canal, the anniversary classic."

Why The Gritti Palace, A Luxury Collection Hotel for an anniversary

The Gritti Palace is the 15th-century palazzo of the Doge Andrea Gritti (the 77th Doge of Venice, 1523-1538), the Marriott Luxury Collection took over the property in 2003 and ran a four-year, €40-million renovation ending in 2013 that returned the property to its Doge-period architectural standard. Eighty-two rooms and suites, the upper-tier Hemingway Presidential Suite (named for Ernest Hemingway, who lived in the suite while writing Across the River and Into the Trees in 1950) is the milestone-anniversary flagship. The asset is the Riva Lounge, the canal-side cocktail terrace that overlooks the Grand Canal at the most-cinematic stretch of the canal (between Santa Maria della Salute and Santa Maria del Giglio), the anniversary-pre-dinner-cocktail-and-photograph venue. Club del Doge (the in-house restaurant on the Grand Canal terrace) is the anniversary-dinner space, the dinner room from the Hemingway novel and a literary-anniversary asset in itself. The Gritti Palace is the right pick for the literary-and-historic anniversary: the trip's centerpiece is a sunset cocktail on the Riva Lounge terrace or a night in the Hemingway Suite, with Marriott Bonvoy loyalty value as the secondary draw.

Best room to request

Hemingway Presidential Suite (the literary-flagship) or Gritti Suite (Grand Canal-facing) for the entry-level palazzo experience.

The wider context

The Gritti Palace, A Luxury Collection Hotel sits within our broader Top 20 Hotels in Venice for an Anniversary list. It scored an aggregate 9.9/10 across the three editorial criteria, competitive against the field but, on an anniversary-specific factors, the angle above is what earned its rank. For the alternatives in the same Venice neighbourhood, see San Marco, Grand Canal and adjacent. For a different city entirely, see the related lists below.

Once your dates are fixed, aim to reserve the room about three months out. The view-facing suites disappear earliest, and high-season inventory moves on a timescale of months, not weeks. Top-category rooms with private pools or terraces, the reason this hotel ranks here, are routinely the first gone.

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Further reading