A private launch still runs guests across the lagoon to the Giudecca, the way it has since 1958. This spring it lands at a hotel that has been quietly rebuilding itself, room by room.
Hotel Cipriani sits apart from the rest of Venice. It holds the tip of the Giudecca, a short crossing from the crush of San Marco and far enough to feel like a separate decision. Guests arrive by water. The hotel launch waits at the jetty and makes the run in a few minutes, and the noise of the city falls away behind it.
The building has been under the hand of Peter Marino for several seasons now. An earlier phase opened a double-height lobby full of light and reworked a first set of suites. The architect has kept the work slow, taking the hotel in stages instead of closing it down all at once.
The spa
This spring brings the part people will talk about. Dior opens its first spa in Venice here, designed by Marino, set into the gardens that run down toward the lagoon. The treatments draw on Christian Dior's love of art and celebration and on the city's long history of masked balls. There are high-technology facials, longer beauty rituals, and holistic therapies for guests who plan to do very little else.
Dior does not stop at the spa door. Il Bacaro Dior takes a spot along the Fondamenta for the season, a small bar for a cocktail and cicchetti with the water and the campanile of San Marco in view across the basin.
The Cipriani has always been the version of Venice you reach by boat. The new work changes what waits at the other end.
The Splendid EditOro
The hotel's Michelin-starred restaurant has been reworked as well. Oro reopens under chef Vania Ghedini, with Massimo Bottura directing the kitchen. The change to notice first is the clock. Oro now serves through the day, with lunch on the menu for the first time, so the dining room is no longer something that happens only after dark.
Bottura's involvement turns the cooking toward the lagoon and the Veneto without making it a museum piece. Ghedini runs the service day to day. The room keeps its gold and its view of the garden.
Oro, the Michelin-starred restaurant at Hotel Cipriani · Courtesy of Belmond
The pool
Behind the restaurant lies the reason a certain kind of guest books here in summer. The Cipriani's pool is Olympic in scale, heated, and filled with filtered seawater, the only one of its kind in Venice. It sits inside two hectares of garden, screened from the lagoon, with loungers set back under the trees.
Across an old courtyard, Palazzo Vendramin keeps a handful of suites in a fifteenth-century residence linked to the main hotel by a passage lined with flowers. The view from there runs over the gardens and straight across the water to San Marco. It is the address within the address.
The verdict
Venice does not lack grand hotels. Most of them fight the same fight with day-trippers and high water. The Cipriani answers it by being on the other side of the basin, with a garden, a pool, and now a spa that carries the Dior name. The boat is the whole point.
Go in late spring or early autumn, when the gardens are full, the pool is warm, and the city across the water is busy without you. Book Palazzo Vendramin if it is free. Take the last launch back at night.
Hotel Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel, Venice. The Dior Spa and the renewed Oro open in April 2026. Book through belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond · Hotel Cipriani, Venice