The 29 Best Places to Drink and Stay in Venice

The Bellini was invented here, which tells you something about the kind of hotel this is. Perched on the tip of Giudecca Island, Cipriani is a Forbes Five Star property that holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list, sitting across the lagoon from the city it lets you briefly escape. Murano glass, Fortuny fixtures, manicured gardens, and a heated saltwater pool fill the grounds, while suites in the Palazzo Vendramin annex come with a private butler.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Five Star
2. The 50 #72 · The World's 50 Best Hotels

The only hotel on the Grand Canal with a water-facing garden, Aman Venice is a Grand Canal palazzo where a count's family still occupies the top floor while guests take the rooms below. That arrangement sets the tone: it feels less like a hotel than a borrowed aristocratic home, very quiet, very beautiful, and priced accordingly. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. The 50 #79 · The World's 50 Best Hotels

A Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal, the Gritti Palace has been hosting the conspicuously well-heeled since before the Renaissance, and it shows, in the best way. Antiques, hand-carved details, and 18th-century wooden lamps fill every corner of the restored interior. During Carnival or the Biennale, A-listers share the lobby without much fanfare. Forbes Four Star.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Arriving by gondola to a 17th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal sets the tone for this luxury hotel, where rooms were designed around the way Venetian light moves across water at different hours. The 169 rooms and suites run from canal-facing to garden-facing, with curlicue topiaries and roses below. Two bars and an Italian restaurant each open onto the outdoors, which in Venice is never a small thing.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Spirited Awards 2026 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Hotel Bar – Europe

Ceiling frescoes painted by students of Tiepolo set the tone for this canal-side luxury hotel a short walk from San Marco. The building was a convent once, and the bones show: stucco, silk-lined walls, antique furnishings, and marble bathrooms that feel lifted from a Doge's private quarters. Guests arrive by private water taxi, which is either romantic or expected at this price point, possibly both.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

Tiepolo frescoes still climb the grand staircase of this palazzo-turned-hotel on the Grand Canal, a short walk from the Rialto market. The Sagredo family filled the place with art when they owned it centuries ago, and most of it never left, so the corridors read more like a museum than a lobby. A boutique hotel and Italian national monument in the same building, which is either perfectly Venetian or just par for the course here.

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A 37-room boutique hotel in a former aristocratic palazzo near the Rialto, Ai Reali pulls off something Venice rarely manages: it feels like staying in someone's well-appointed home rather than a converted monument. Antiques and odd little nooks throughout the building do most of the work. Marble baths and a surprisingly comprehensive spa handle the luxury-hotel part. San Marco is a short walk, which is either a selling point or a warning, depending on your relationship with crowds.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

A former orphanage on the Riva degli Schiavoni, this boutique hotel has been so thoroughly colonized by the owning family's art and curiosity collections that every corridor feels like a cabinet of wonders. The Oriental tearoom occupies what was once a chapel. Rooms overlook the Grand Canal, and guests arriving by boat can slip in through a private water entrance, which is exactly as satisfying as it sounds.

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Fifty-two rooms on the Riva degli Schiavoni, which means your window competes directly with San Giorgio Maggiore for your attention. This boutique hotel leans into 19th-century Venice hard: brocade walls, Biedermeier furniture, tapestry-draped windows, and bathrooms lined in pink Carrara marble roomy enough to actually use. The neoclassical facade is the kind that makes other buildings on the waterfront quietly reconsider themselves.

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A neo-Gothic palace on the Grand Canal where a Florentine architect stripped the usual Venetian overload down to clean lines and considered materials, making the simple feel sumptuous. It sits on Dorsoduro's museum mile, between the Guggenheim and the Accademia, so the neighborhood pulls its weight too. A hotel that reads more like a well-edited gallery than a period-room fantasy, which in Venice is a genuine act of restraint.

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A handful of bar stools at a grey marble counter, and the rest of the room is tightly packed tables that belong to diners at mealtimes. Harry's is a cocktail bar that trades heavily on its history, and it earned every bit of it: this is where the Bellini was invented, and Hemingway was a regular. It's small, plain, and slightly intimidating to walk into, which somehow makes ordering one feel like an occasion.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Its own private island in the Venice lagoon, connected to the city by hotel boat, which already tells you what kind of trip this is. The JW Marriott Venice is a full resort spread across five distinct accommodation areas, from garden rooms in the main building to a two-bedroom villa with a private pool facing the water. A century-old olive grove shades one wing; the lagoon is never far from any of them. Pack accordingly.

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A former monastery on its own private island, a short water taxi ride from the chaos of the Rialto, San Clemente Palace is the kind of resort that makes Venice feel like a secret you kept from yourself. The grounds run to gardens and a heated pool, the lagoon views arrive with every meal, and the spa leans into the monastic herbs with some self-awareness. The rooms carry the weight of the old stone walls without feeling like a history lesson.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Tucked under the Procuratie Nuove arcades on Piazza San Marco, Caffè Florian has been around forever, and the gilded, frescoed rooms know it. It's a coffee and drinks bar where tourists come for the theater of the thing and locals duck in for a quick espresso at the counter, which costs considerably less than sitting down in the ornate dining rooms with the orchestra outside. Both options exist; just know which one you're paying for.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Bartenders in white tuxedos hand drinks to bellboys who carry them across one of the more theatrical lobby lounges in Venice, which is saying something. The Dandolo is a hotel bar in the Gothic palazzo next to the Doge's Palace, and the setting does most of the heavy lifting. Classic cocktails are reliably solid; the rest of the menu is less memorable. Come for the room, not the drinks list.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The terrace hangs right over the Grand Canal, which is either romantic or deeply unfair depending on your budget. This hotel bar inside the Gritti Palace does the Grand Venetian thing without apology: etched mirrors, red marble floors, white-tie bartenders working through a long menu of classics. The crowd leans tourist, but the setting is so extravagant that nobody seems to mind being exactly where a postcard told them to be.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The terrace hangs right over the Grand Canal, which is the whole argument for sitting here. This hotel bar at the Bauer does its job quietly, with black leather club chairs and scarlet walls they call the Red Room, though the interior is otherwise pretty modest by Venetian hotel-bar standards. Order something cold and watch the boats go by, which is exactly what everyone around you is doing.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Wine labels plaster the ceiling at this old-school Venetian wine bar tucked into a narrow alley near the Rialto, and the cellar below holds over a thousand bottles at prices that feel slightly illegal for Venice. Rough wooden benches, bare planks on the walls, and a glass counter piled with cicheti complete the picture. Locals have been doing exactly this, a glass and a small bite, here for generations.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A corner bacaro a short walk from San Marco, with shutters thrown open and barely a meter of corridor to stand in. The reason to know it is the hours: open until 1am most nights and 2am on Saturdays, long after Venice has gone to bed. Drinkers overflow onto the campo, voices carrying loudly enough to navigate by, which the neighbors have noted and the police occasionally confirm.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide