Airelles Palladio Venezia

The girls of the Zitelle were taught to make lace, and one of their collars, the hotel says, went to Reims for the coronation of Louis XIV. The French have since come to Giudecca in person. The Zitelle was a refuge for young women without dowries, built round a church credited to Andrea Palladio and facing St Mark's across the Giudecca Canal; it was the Bauer's Palladio hotel until Airelles reopened it in April 2026, its first house outside France. Villa Frollo, a noble house that later took in painters and writers as a pensione, shares almost a hectare of garden with it, and the Conventino, once a refuge for widows, is let whole as a villa with its own pool. The smaller rooms keep worn brick and terracotta floors; the Suite del Doge runs to 450 square metres, with the basilica and the Doge's Palace in the windows.

Recommended for families who want Venice in its finery without walking the children round all of it, and for couples who would rather cross the water to the crowds than sleep among them. The hotel's boat reaches St Mark's in five minutes, on demand. Breakfast, the minibar and the spa are in the rate, and so is Piccoli Camp, the kids club, open from nine in the morning until nine at night. Outside there is a heated 25-metre pool with a separate one for children, and the spa keeps a third indoors. The hotel teaches voga alla veneta, the standing stroke Venetians row with, out on the lagoon. The table to book is at Villa Frollo, where Norbert Niederkofler cooks from the lagoon and its producers. In a house where girls once made lace for a king, the children now get masked balls.