If someone asked for a fun place to stay in Venice, the answer would undoubtedly be The Venice Venice. Firstly, because it’s a super cool place. Upon entry you’ll stumble upon a concept store, Paris-London-New York style, with ethnic carpets, historical design objects, a clothing collection with godet skirts, striped t-shirts (like the gondoliers) and Friuliane slippers in coloured velvet. Then there’s the restaurant with red brick walls and posters of local suppliers: the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the butcher … A with a few more steps you’ll arrive to the terrace, usually very crowded when it’s sunny: read «always book» to guarantee an americano (perfect with orange flavoured foam) or a plate of tagliolini with truffles (what a perfume!) overlooking the Rialto bridge.
Unexpectedly, a side door opens out into a docking spot for those who arrive by speedboat which recalls the unmistakable style of the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa: this is the entrance for hotel guests. You ascend between two rows of candles (or in the lift, but it’s less spectacular), and check in (and while you wait they offer you a coffee) and you enter the noble floor of the historic building Cà da Mosto with the classic terrazzo floor, very high windows and, towards the Canal Grande, a room entirely covered with a tapestry by Francesco Simeti, which contrasts with the electronic bar in the centre, for drinks & music in the evening.
Let’s go back a few steps, between sofas and armchairs separated by old cast iron radiators painted in black: the dreamy photos on the walls alternate with the original doors of the building. There, protected behind original armoured doors, are the rooms, 41 distributed in two buildings, each dedicated to a different artist. That of Igor Mitoraj, which overlooks the bridge of Rialto, is large and high enough to house the artist’s extra large sculptures. While the room-studio of the photographer Renato D’Agostin, on two floors, with a functioning camera to take photos which will be developed by the artist himself. Besides the art, the rooms are large, bright, with a series of kind thoughts for guests, from soaps and creams in tubes, as it used to be, to the trolley of spirits and of course a moka for the first coffee in the morning, which you can enjoy in the comfort of your bed.
All in all, The Venice Venice is not a single thing but a shop-hotel-cicchetteria-restaurant, where Alessandro and Francesca Gallo, former owners of the fashion brand Golden Goose and now of the new The Erose, summarise a style filled with contaminations from all over the world, evoking the very core of Venice.
They like to define the project a “post-Venetian manifesto”, which abandons clichés, not tradition, to spot new trends in local design, art and craftsmanship starting with hospitality. On the other hand Cà da Mosto, one of the oldest on the Canal Grande with Romanesque elements intersecting in the Byzantine style, was the famous Locanda del Leon Bianco, where the intellectuals of the Grand Tour stopped, such as Voltaire, who settled there for the lunch of the six kings in Candide and the Count of the North, son incognito of the empress Catherine of Russia. Today The Venice Venice retains memory of its past in the daily exchange with guests, but above all it is the lifestyle ambassador of the contemporary, authentically Venetian, and Italian in general.
