Venice, Italy

Ca' Di Dio

Price per night from$481.44

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR445.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Laidback Venetian hospitality

Setting

Lounging by the lagoon

Though parts of Ca’ di Dio date back to medieval times, there’s nothing old-fashioned about its 21st-century update: all Murano-glass chandeliers, polished marble and preserved frescoes. This contemporary take on a traditional Venetian house sits around three internal courtyards, where you can breakfast on delicate Venetian pastries and ristretto, or find a shady spot beneath softly scented mimosa and magnolia trees to leaf through the hotel’s own inside guide to the best hidden local attractions. A sense of calm pervades throughout the hotel, from the bigger-than-average bedrooms to an airy lobby that’s decorated with antique statues and porticoes from old churches, though the true path to enlightenment is more likely to be found in the spa’s treatment rooms.

Smith Extra

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A typical Venetian apéritif a person, each stay, and room upgrade on arrival (subject to availability)

Facilities

Photos Ca' Di Dio facilities

Need to know

Rooms

66 rooms across three floors, including 57 suites.

Check–Out

3pm, but flexible for a charge and subject to availability. Check-in, 12 noon.

Prices

Double rooms from £419.44 (€490), including tax at 10 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of €5.00 per person per night on check-out.

More details

Rates usually include breakfast.

Also

Don’t be put out by the lack of a traditional front desk or concierge. The hotel’s ‘Venetian house’ ethos means that instead of a rotating cast of identikit staff, you’ll have one or two friendly points of contact to look after you throughout your stay.

At the hotel

Two restaurants, spa and gym, free WiFi. In-rooms: flatscreen TV, minibar, coffee machine, kettle, bathrobes, slippers and air-conditioning.

Our favourite rooms

Make like a doge and check in to one of the hotel’s two Altana Suites. Upping the wow factor spectacularly, each has a staircase that climbs to its own private roof terrace. Up here in your ivory (ok, mostly wooden) tower, you can spend cocktail hour soaking in uninterrupted sunset views across the shimmering lagoon to the Benedictine spire of San Giorgio Maggiore. The other suites are no slouches either, all with bags of space (unusual by Venice hotel standards), polished stone floors, exposed beams, upholstered panelling, Murano-glass lamps and gleaming marble bathrooms.

Spa

Relaxing treatments or an adrenaline-pumping workout can be found at the Pura spa and wellness centre. There's also a sauna and steam bath, €25 each for 30 minutes (or €40 for both).

Packing tips

Pack your biggest, floppiest straw hat for those eating-gelato-in-a-gondola photo opportunities.

Pet‐friendly

Pups under 15kg are welcome for €40 a day, except in the restaurant and pool area. See more pet-friendly hotels in Venice.

Children

Extra beds can be added to suites on request and babysitting is available for an extra charge.

Sustainability efforts

Ca’ di Dio is admirably obsessive about keeping it local, to the extent that the water for its concealed cooling system is slurped straight from the lagoon. There’s a kitchen garden in the courtyard and many of the hotel’s decorative elements come courtesy of local craftspeople, such as the bespoke Murano-glass lamps and chandeliers found throughout.

Food and Drink

Photos Ca' Di Dio food and drink

Top Table

If weather permits, your best bet for lagoon views is on Vero’s terrace, where people-watching is de rigueur at lunch, and the sun setting on San Giorgio and the lagoon over dinner might even make you feel like you’re in your very own Monet masterpiece.

Dress Code

You’re meant to feel at home here, so dress codes are informal. But this is Italy, so you might want to leave the jogging pants at home and bring something a little more eye-catching for dining in Vero.

Hotel restaurant

Polished Venetian floors, frescoed ceilings and crisp white tablecloths are the order of the day at Vero, the hotel’s main restaurant, with seating on the terrace overlooking the lagoon to San Giorgio Maggiore in the warmer months. The ethos here is simple yet refined Venetian home cooking – traditional fish, meat and pasta dishes made using wholly local produce and ingredients from the courtyard garden – served alongside handpicked wines from the Veneto. Vero is open for lunch and dinner.

Essentia is a less formal affair. Designed for relaxed daytime dining and snacking, it’s set in the internal courtyard amid the fragrant trees and shrubs, meandering pathways and two original stone wells.

Hotel bar

Just off the lobby is Alchemia, a gleaming cocktail bar where mixologists knock up traditional and experimental concoctions using local ingredients.

Last orders

Breakfast is served in Essentia from 7am until 10.30am, with all-day dining thereafter. In Vero, dinner is from 7pm to 11pm. Lunch is available here during the summer months only. Alchemia opens at 11am and closes at 1am.

Location

Photos Ca' Di Dio location
Address
Ca' Di Dio
Riva Ca' di Dio, 2181
Venice
30122
Italy

Ca’ di Dio sits on the waterfront in Venice's laidback Castello district, just a few minutes’ stroll from Piazza San Marco. There’s a less hurried pace in this historic neighbourhood, where locals sip wine alfresco as the sun sets on the Riva.

Planes

Venice’s Marco Polo airport is served by the Alilaguna water bus (vaporetto), which drops you right in front of the hotel at Arsenale. Vaporetto tickets can be purchased individually, or in discounted one- to three-day passes, in case you’re planning to sightsee your socks off.

Trains

Arrivals at Venezia Santa Lucia can also take the vaporetto for the 40-minute ride to Arsenale. Landlubbers should hop off a couple of stops early for an espresso at Piazza San Marco. The hotel lies a 10-minute stroll along the lagoon from here.

Automobiles

Venice’s narrow alleys and waterways mean that – unless you’re rich enough to own an amphibious vehicle – your best bet is to park on the mainland, which is cheaper and less prone to traffic snarl-ups than the roads around the city centre. From Mestre, you can take the train or ferry into the centre.

Other

Clichéd it may well be, but you can’t really say you’ve been to Venice until you’ve taken a gondola ride or private water taxi along the Grand Canal. Both will pick you up and drop you off directly at the hotel’s side entrance on Rio de l’Arsenale.

Worth getting out of bed for

Even the laziest explorer will find ticking off Venice's biggest attractions a breeze. It’s just a 10-minute waterfront stroll to Piazza San Marco, where the cathedral’s grand Byzantine domes, ludicrously opulent Doge’s Palace and Bridge of Sighs will provide more Instagrammable photo opportunities than your last three holidays combined. If your poor beleaguered feet are equal to the challenge, you’re only about another 10 minutes from here to the Rialto Bridge and Peggy Guggenheim Collection. But if even that seems too much like hard work, simply flop into a gondola and let someone else take the strain for a while.

For a taste of the true Venice, stroll east from the hotel away from the centre, through ramshackle narrow streets where washing hangs drying between buildings overhead, and small fishing boats bob on not-so-grand canals. Here the intrepid traveller will be rewarded with artisan shops, bars and cafés along Via Garibaldi – a wide boulevard beloved of Venetians.

This is also where you’ll find the Giardini della Biennale, a parkland oasis that plays host to the Venice Art Biennale every other year. Stroll the leafy boulevards admiring the magnificent monuments and palatial pavilions that dot the landscape. Art fiends visiting between May and November in odd-numbered years can expect to experience a dizzying smorgasbord of contemporary works from across the globe, displayed throughout the Giardini, Arsenale dockyards and beyond.

Local restaurants

A firm favourite with in-the-know locals, Osteria Alle Testiere is perhaps Castello’s tiniest seafood restaurant, seating just 22 at a time. You’re advised to book well in advance if you want to find out for yourself what the fuss is about. The menu changes daily, based on whatever is freshest at market that morning, but expect classic Venetian fish dishes like steamed spider crab and potato gnocchetti with lobster, alongside an extensive range of local wines. Desserts like classic tiramisu and Venetian cream caramel will surely have you loosening your belt before last orders. A 20-minute vaporetto ride along the lagoon will take you to Hotel Il Palazzo Experimental, whose Il Ristorante Adriatica is an upmarket, dress-to-impress kind of place, serving playful takes on Italian specialities from the coastal regions of the Adriatic. Think risotto of scallops and white asparagus or cuttlefish with lemon, rocket and almonds.

Local bars

A romantic evening stroll north through Venice backstreets, skirting the Grand Canal and Rialto Bridge, will take you to Vino Vero, an intimate and informal canalfront wine bar where bottles are stacked ceiling-high on towering wooden shelves. Specialising in natural wines from small, mostly local producers, this Venice institution is also famed for its cicchetti (Venetian tapas). After several platefuls and, more than likely, one glass of valpolicella too many, it’s recommended you skip the stroll back and take a water taxi instead.

Reviews

Photos Ca' Di Dio reviews

Anonymous review

Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this lagoonside Venetian-house-style hotel in La Serenissima’s Castello district, unpacked their busolai (Venetian butter cookies) and given their gondolier magnet pride of place on the fridge door, a full account of their sightseeing odyssey will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside Ca’ di Dio in Venice...

Ca’ di Dio lies in the increasingly trendy Arsenale dockyards in Venice’s Castello district, home to the Venice Art Biennale. There’s a distinctly local feel here in the quiet zone between bustling Piazza San Marco – the veritable hub of Venetian tourism – and the older and arguably far more atmospheric residential quarter, with its traditional shops and cafés.

The hotel’s pale Istrian stone, arched windows, cool, airy spaces and calming courtyards provide a modern and oh-so-Venetian ambiance, while original features like the stone wells in the internal courtyard ground Ca’ di Dio firmly in its historic past. Particularly spectacular at sunset, is the view the hotel has of San Giorgio Maggiore’s spire just across the lagoon, instantly recognisable from Claude Monet’s celebrated series of Venice skyline paintings. 

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Price per night from $481.44