The Bauer Hotel is a five-star hotel located on the Grand Canal in the San Marcosestiere of Venice, Italy, near the Piazza San Marco. It originally opened in 1880 as the Grand Hotel d'Italie Bauer-Grünwald and moved to its current location in 1902. The rooms in the modern section are marketed under the Bauer name, while those in the older section are marketed as the Bauer Palazzo. The Bauer group also owns several other hotels in Venice: the Bauer Casa Nova, adjacent to the hotel on the Campo San Moisè; and the Bauer Palladio and Villa F, on the Giudecca facing San Marco across the Giudecca Canal.
History
The hotel was founded by an Italian, Mr. Bauer, a director of Venice's Hotel de la Ville, and an Austrian, Julius or Giulio Grünwald, who married Bauer's daughter. In 1930, Grünwald's heirs sold the hotel to Arnaldo Bennati, a Ligurian shipbuilder. The hotel was closed for much of the 1940s, during which Bennati made extensive renovations and added a modern wing in the rear. In 1999, Francesca Bortolotto Possati, granddaughter of Arnaldo Bennati, became the Chairwoman and CEO of the hotel.
Services
The Bauer offers 56 suites and 135 rooms. The hotel restaurant is the De Pisis. Breakfast is served on the 7th floor terrace, the Settimo Cielo, which in the evening serves drinks and snacks. The Canal Bar is outside, at ground level, and the B Bar offers live jazz performances.
Building
The building, sometimes called the Palazzo Bauer, was designed by in an eclectic neo-Gothic style, "perhaps the most significant representative of late-nineteenth century Venetian medieval mannerism". Demolition of the existing buildings began in 1900 and construction was completed in 1902. On the southwest corner is the Canal Bar, a large ground-level terrace surrounded by a stone fretwork fence; at the corner there stands and a 3.6m tall statue of a woman representing Italy, a work of Carlo Lorenzetti. Before the hotel's construction, this was a public square called dei Felzi. The site had previously held a 15th-century building in the "Arabo-Byzantine" style, demolished in 1844. Some fragments of that building were incorporated into Sardi's construction. An extra floor was added on top in 1939 by Giovanni or Giuseppe Berti. The 7th-floor terrace "Settimo Cielo" is the highest terrace in Venice. The rear section, facing the Campo San Moisè, was designed by Marino Meo in 1945 and completed in 1949. The façade of the church San Moisè has been called "the busiest façade in town" and contrasts with the travertine cladding and light-colored marble columns of the Bauer, "brutally modernist in its plainness"; Joseph Brodsky described the juxtaposition as "Albert Speer having a pizza capricciosa". The hotel underwent a major remodelling in 1999, under Bortolotto Possati.
Location
The hotel fronts on the Grand Canal on the south. To its left, across the Rio San Moisè, is the :it:Palazzo Treves de Bonfili|Palazzo Treves-Barozzi, and to its right, separated by the Calle Tredici Martiri, is the :it:Ca' Giustinian|Ca' Giustinian. The hotel's main entrance is on the north, on the Campo San Moisè. On its west runs the Rio San Moisè, on which it has a boat landing. It faces the Dogana and the Salute across the Grand Canal.
