< ITALY | VENICE: Hotel Londra Palace

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In the year 1860, there was great excitement in Venice for the opening of a new hotel on Riva degli Schiavoni, just a few steps from Piazza San Marco: the grand five star Beau Rivage. It had been designed by Fuin, a famous Venetian engineer of the period, in neo-Lombard style with white marble from Istria. It was built next to Hôtel d'Angleterre et Pension, which had been built seven years before by an architect named Rossini.

One next to the other, the two Hotels were predestined to become one in the year 1900 with a new name: Hôtel Londres et Beau Rivage, the two hotels were latter connected by a central part that brought the number of the windows on the Lagoon to one hundred. With exception for the years during the fascism, because of the extreme dislike for foreign words, Hôtel Londres et Beau Rivage, became Hotel Bella Riva during that period, keeping that name until 1973, and then only recently became the current Hôtel Londra Palace.

A journal of the period wrote that Gabriele D'Annunzio, in periods of economic shortage, instead of going to the near Hôtel Danieli, he used to be profoundly satisfied to go to the elegant Beau Rivage; and this is what he did in the autumn of 1894 for the inauguration of a monument dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II.

One of the hotel’s most famous guests was the Russian composer Petr Il’lc Tchaikovsky who stayed here in December 1877. In room 106 he composed the first three movements of Symphony No. 4, originally entitled ‘Do Leoni’, in honour of the lion of San Marco and of the English rampart one. This was a masterpiece, which he composed in room 106, as the pictures and souvenirs left to the Hôtel by the Russian government witness. Other important names include Jorge Luis Borges and Iosif Brodskij, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.

In March 1999, the Hôtel Londra Palace finished being restored in its common parts and the facade, from the lobby to the restaurant, a project that began in 1992 and cost eight million dollars. The first phase of the job was to turn the 73 rooms in 53, adding more comfort and putting marble in the bathrooms. The remarkable restoration left the hotel's history, personality and architecture integral, granting it a new modern look made of lights and those typical contrasts of the new millennium.

On November 28, 2001, Hôtel Londra Palace enters in the most prestigious luxury hotel chain in the world, the Small Luxury Hotels of the World.

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