Belmond Hotel Cipriani

The Hotel

Hotel Cipriani opened in 1958, the project of Giuseppe Cipriani — the founder of Harry's Bar in San Marco and the inventor of the Bellini cocktail and carpaccio — together with the Guinness family of London. Cipriani's argument was that Venice's existing hotels (Danieli, Gritti, Bauer, Excelsior on the Lido) were all locked into the constraints of historic palazzo footprints, and that a Venetian luxury hotel could mean something entirely different if you began with a clean site, three acres of land, and the lagoon as the front garden. The site he chose was the eastern tip of Giudecca, the long narrow island south of the historic centre, looking directly across the Bacino di San Marco to the Doge's Palace and Piazza San Marco. The hotel passed to Sea Containers in 1976, then to the Belmond group in 2014, then to LVMH (which acquired Belmond in 2019). It has been in continuous operation since opening.

There are 96 rooms and suites in total: 80 in the principal hotel building (a low-rise, four-storey structure that runs along the lagoon-facing edge of the property) and 16 in the Palazzo Vendramin annex, a 15th-century palazzo that the hotel acquired and restored in the 1990s. The Vendramin suites face directly onto the Bacino di San Marco — the most-photographed view in Venice from a hotel room — and come with private butler service. The principal hotel building combines lagoon-facing, garden-facing, and pool-facing rooms; the largest signature suite, the Palladio Suite, runs over 200 square metres with a private terrace looking at San Giorgio Maggiore. Rooms have been refreshed at intervals — the most recent significant programme by interior designer Adam D. Tihany in the 2010s — without disturbing the property's mid-century Mediterranean character.

The pool is the unrepeatable amenity. It is the only outdoor swimming pool in central Venice, set in the middle of the property, surrounded by clipped hedges and the gardens that have given the Cipriani its identity since opening. The water is heated salt water; the pool runs from approximately April through October. Other amenities at the property scale are essentially unique in the city: tennis courts (the only ones at any Venice hotel), the Casanova Spa with hammam and a small indoor relaxation pool, and the Cipriani's signature kitchens — Oro (one Michelin star, contemporary Italian), Cip's Club (the lagoon-facing brasserie, with the Salute and the Doge's Palace as the view), and the Pool Restaurant for daytime service. The hotel runs a complimentary five-minute launch service to St. Mark's Square, on call until 1am; for late-night returns, a private water taxi from the hotel pier handles it.

Belmond Hotel Cipriani is, alongside Aman Venice, one of the two top addresses in the city, and the two are not interchangeable. The Aman is the historic-palazzo-on-the-Grand-Canal proposition; the Cipriani is the resort-island-with-a-garden-and-a-pool proposition. For honeymoons that combine sightseeing days with serious decompression, the Cipriani is generally the better answer; for stays that focus on architecture and lagoon-side dinners with the Salute as the view, the Aman is. For families, multi-generational groups, and stays of five-plus nights, the Cipriani's pool, garden, and tennis court give it the edge. The hotel reliably appears on the Travel + Leisure 500 and the Condé Nast Traveler Gold List; it earned its second MICHELIN Key in the 2024 Hotel Guide.

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