Positioned on the Giudecca's northern edge with the entire Venetian skyline — San Giorgio Maggiore, the Campanile, the Doge's Palace — arrayed across the water like a painted backdrop, the Cipriani has held one of the great site advantages in European hospitality since Giuseppe Cipriani opened it in 1958. The property was conceived not as a palazzo conversion but as a purpose-built garden hotel, low-slung and terracotta-washed, its four floors stepping back from the lagoon in a manner that keeps the views generous from almost every angle. The Olympic-length pool, visible in the aerial image with white-canopied loungers ranged along its edge, remains one of the very few in Venice proper — a civilised impossibility in a city where flat ground is itself a luxury. Inside, the 96 rooms and suites draw on the full vocabulary of the Venetian decorative tradition without surrendering to pastiche. Lacquered bedheads in the Settecento manner sit against damask wallpapers in warm cream and gold; herringbone parquet floors anchor rooms furnished with painted Venetian case pieces and Persian rugs; blown-glass Murano chandeliers cast the kind of diffuse amber light that makes everything look like a Tiepolo. The lagoon-facing terrace restaurant, lit at dusk by iron lanterns and set with mosaic-topped tables directly above the water's edge, distils the property's essential proposition: that the most persuasive argument for staying on the Giudecca is the view back toward a city you are relieved, briefly, not to be inside.

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