The Bauer Hotel is a historic five-star hotel located on the north bank of the Grand Canal in the San Marco sestiere of Venice, Italy, near the Piazza San Marco. It closed in November 2022 for renovations, with plans to reopen in 2025.[1]
History
The hotel was founded in 1880 as the Grand Hotel d'Italie Bauer-Grünwald by Mr. Bauer, a director of Venice's Hotel de la Ville, and Julius (Giulio) Grünwald, an Austrian who married Bauer's daughter.
The main hotel building, facing the Grand Canal, was rebuilt from 1900 to 1902,[2] to designs by architect Giovanni Sardi in an eclectic neo-Gothic style,[3][4] which has been described as "perhaps the most significant representative of late-nineteenth century Venetian medieval mannerism".[5]
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.[2] The hotel's site previously held a 15th-century building in the "Arabo-Byzantine" style,
Services
The Bauer offers 56 suites and 135 rooms.
The hotel restaurant is 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.
Location
To the left of the hotel, across the Rio San Moisè, is the Palazzo Treves-Barozzi, and to its right, separated by the Calle Tredici Martiri, is the 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.
Other Bauer properties in Venice
For a period in the 2010s, the Bauer group operated three additional properties: the Residenza Grunwald (formerly Bauer Casa Nova), located adjacent to the hotel on the Campo San Moisè;[21] and the Bauer Palladio and the Villa F, both located on the Giudecca, facing San Marco across the Giudecca Canal.
In literature
The Bauer-Grünwald is one of the settings of Chekhov's novella An Anonymous Story (1893).