Palazzo Bauer

About

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.

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, to designs by architect Giovanni Sardi in an eclectic neo-Gothic style, which has been described as "perhaps the most significant representative of late-nineteenth century Venetian medieval mannerism". 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 hotel's site previously held a 15th-century building in the "Arabo-Byzantine" style, which was demolished in 1844. Some fragments of that building were incorporated into...