Palazzo Donà Giovannelli has presided over Venice's Cannaregio since 1436, its pink diamond-patterned facade and Gothic loggia of clustered columns among the most distinctive faces on any canal in the city. The building's authorship is attributed to Filippo Calendario, the master mason linked to the Palazzo Ducale, and its interior was later graced by a sinuous octagonal staircase installed in the nineteenth century by Giovanni Battista Meduna. Eight years of restoration work have transformed it into Orient Express Venezia, opening in 2026 with 47 rooms, suites, and residences, under the direction of Aline Asmar d'Amman of Culture in Architecture, who has made the palazzo's layered history the central subject of the design. Asmar d'Amman's approach holds the original fabric and contemporary intervention in close conversation throughout. Original frescoes survive on the grandest ceilings, their baroque figurative painting in blush and gold kept intact above beds hung with draped silk canopies and furnished with Carrara marble nightstands. In the restaurant, existing carved timber beams coexist with deep green textured wall coverings, Murano glass chandeliers in candy-pink tazzas overhead, and circular ceramic artworks mounted between gilded mirror panels. The bar shifts into a warmer, more concentrated atmosphere: a rippled brass ceiling, a marble counter fronted in dark mosaic stone, and low pink wave-upholstered chairs gathered around chess-inlaid tables. Murano glass and mosaic floors recur across the property as connecting threads, binding centuries of Venetian craft into a single coherent interior world.