Palazzo Venart

Pandolfo Malatesta, a mercenary captain with an eye for art, went to ground in this house with excommunication hanging over him, the hotel says, and it is still a good place to keep out of the way: a quiet stretch of the Grand Canal in Santa Croce. The house is fifteenth-century. Fire badly damaged its canal front in 1845, and the repairs ran on until 1880. Since 2016 it has been a hotel of seventeen rooms, no two alike. In one, a pale painted sky crossed by swallows fills the ceiling inside a gilt frame, and the windows are roundels of coloured glass. Between the house and the water is a garden of Roman sculpture with a pier of its own, and on the far bank stands a red Gothic palazzo.

Recommended for couples who come to Venice to eat as much as to look. Glam, the hotel's restaurant, is the only one in the city with two Michelin stars; Donato Ascani, the resident chef, cooks there under Enrico Bartolini, from the Rialto fish market and Venetian gardens. One of its two tasting menus is called Art, Gardens and Lagoon, which is most of Venice in four words. Tables are in a glazed dining room or out in the courtyard under an old magnolia; Glam opens for lunch and dinner Wednesday to Sunday, so plan the nights round it. The Rialto is ten minutes on foot; for Murano's glassmakers and Burano's lace, the hotel's boat leaves from the pier. Or an instructor will collect guests from the same pier by rowboat for ninety minutes of Venetian rowing, as close as this house comes to a gym.