Nolinski Venezia

Nolinski Venezia

On the Calle Larga XXII Marzo, a five-minute walk from Piazza San Marco and close enough to La Fenice to catch the applause on a clear night, Nolinski Venezia occupies the former Chamber of Commerce and stock exchange, a stile Liberty building from 1929 whose five-storey façade, carved with chimeras and other maritime figures, has watched the canal traffic for close to a century. The building reopened as a hotel on 1 July 2023, the second Nolinski after Paris (2016) and the first Evok Collection address outside France, brought about by the group's three founders, Pierre Bastid, Romain Yzerman and Emmanuel Sauvage, who had wanted a Venice property for years and moved when the old exchange came up. Forty-three rooms and suites are spread across the five floors, thirty rooms and thirteen suites, each named for a Venetian figure, Bianca, Pietro, Caterina, Enrico, Giacomo and Tiziano among them, no two built to the same plan. The interiors are the work of Le Coadic Scotto, the French-Italian partnership of Yann Le Coadic and Alessandro Scotto, who kept the building's metal-clad office doors and modular ceiling shelving and filled them with art books and Murano glass from the furnace Avem, working in stucco marmorino, dusky pink velvet and mango wood, avoiding the usual Venetian shorthand of gilt and damask. Zeffirino, a Ligurian restaurant founded in Genoa in 1939, runs the food programme, with Il Caffè Zeffirino open through the day for something lighter and the Library Bar, four thousand books deep under a ceiling fresco by the artist Simon Buret, doing service as reading room and piano bar once the sun goes down. The spa, run with myBlend, has an Ottoman-inspired treatment suite and a gold mosaic pool on the roof, the one part of the hotel guests reliably photograph and rarely describe well afterward. What Nolinski Venezia offers is not the hush of a converted palazzo; the Gritti is around the corner and still does that register better, but the confidence of a twentieth-century commercial building that no longer performs its old function and doesn't try to disguise it. It suits a guest who wants a properly central San Marco address without the marble-and-brocade formula, who likes a hotel with an actual evening bar culture rather than a lobby that empties by ten, and who doesn't mind Ferragamo and Armani for neighbours instead of gondola workshops. Much of the original opening staff is still in place, and it shows in the kind of attentiveness that remembers a name or a request without being reminded twice. You should not come if you want centuries of ancestral hush in your walls, or if a converted stock exchange sounds more clever on paper than comfortable in practice; this is a building with a working history, not a noble one. You should come for a central Venice base with a design pedigree that skips the obvious Murano-and-damask playbook, for Zeffirino's Ligurian kitchen and a Library Bar worth an evening on its own terms, and for a rooftop pool that, off-peak and out of season, is one of the better ways to see San Marco's rooftops without company. The short version: A five-storey former stock exchange from 1929 on Calle Larga XXII Marzo, reopened in 2023 by Evok Collection, with 43 rooms and suites by Le Coadic Scotto, a Ligurian kitchen from Zeffirino, and a rooftop pool over San Marco.