Baglioni Hotel Luna

Baglioni Hotel Luna

A hundred metres from Piazza San Marco, close enough that the bells of the Campanile reach the courtyard on the hour, the Baglioni Hotel Luna occupies a palazzo whose foundations are said to date to 1118, when it sheltered Knights Templar en route to the Crusades, and which was already known as the Osteria della Luna by the twelfth century, before becoming the Locanda della Luna in 1574, a claim to being the oldest continuously operating hotel in Venice that few properties in the city can seriously contest. Guests arrive the way Venetians have always arrived, by water, stepping from a taxi onto the hotel's own private dock on the San Marco basin, with San Giorgio Maggiore visible across the lagoon from the upper floors. The building was bought by the Reuben brothers, David and Simon, in 2021 for close to €100 million, and is run under the Baglioni Hotels & Resorts brand, the Italian hotel group founded in 1974 by Roberto Polito. There are 91 rooms and suites, including four signature suites, among them the two-level Giorgione Terrace Suite and the two-bedroom San Giorgio Terrace Suite, which has its own hundred-square-metre roof terrace looking straight across the piazza. The interiors keep faith with the address: damask wallpaper, Murano glass chandeliers, marble bathrooms, brocade upholstery in the deep reds and golds that read as more Venetian Republic than boutique hotel restraint. Breakfast is served under the original eighteenth-century ceiling frescoes, attributed to pupils of Giambattista Tiepolo, in what is now called the Salone Marco Polo, a room grand enough that the coffee arrives slightly beside the point. The Canova Restaurant, named for the eighteenth-century Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova, carries the concept of Michelin-starred chef Claudio Sadler, seating a small number of covers for dinner and a more relaxed bistrot menu at lunch, with the Canova Bar running an aperitivo ritual at 19.02 each evening built around Cantine Ferrari. The Baglioni Spa, added in a recent renovation, takes its cue from Venice's old trade routes east, with a Turkish hammam rather than the more predictable Nordic sauna. In the evenings, the hotel arranges walks with a codega, the caped lantern-bearing guide who once escorted Venetian nobility home through unlit streets, a genuine local tradition rather than an invented one. Staying here means being inside the loudest five minutes of Venice while somehow not being subject to them: the crowds working their way from the Bridge of Sighs to the Rialto pass within a few hundred metres and are audible only as a kind of distant weather. It suits a certain guest well, the one who wants proximity to San Marco itself and doesn't mind paying for it in gilt and brocade rather than pared-back plaster and linen, who would rather arrive by boat and have breakfast under a fresco than eat pastries at a quiet campo table three bridges away. It is a hotel that performs Venice's grandest register, not its most private one. You should not come here if you want the Venice of narrow, half-forgotten canals and a hotel that disappears into a residential street, since the Luna sits, deliberately, at the most trafficked intersection of the city and its decor announces itself rather than receding. You should come for the water entrance, for the Tiepolo-school ceilings over breakfast, and for the particular satisfaction of being a hundred metres from the Basilica with a private dock between you and the crowd. The short version: A twelfth-century Venetian palazzo a hundred metres from Piazza San Marco, with 91 rooms, a private water entrance, Tiepolo-school ceiling frescoes, and dinners built around Claudio Sadler's cooking.