Hotel Danieli Site Features

The Gothic courtyard and staircase

The most striking survival from the Palazzo Dandolo is the covered inner courtyard, with a gilded four-storey staircase rising through it under a glass roof. The glazing is a 19th-century hotel addition -- what had been an open Venetian courtyard was roofed to make a lobby, which is why the space reads as both palace and hotel at once.

The three buildings

What is sold as one hotel is three connected ones: the Gothic Palazzo Dandolo of around 1400, the Palazzo Danieli Excelsior added in the 1940s, and a third structure joined later. Only the first is the historic palace; guests are frequently surprised to be housed in one of the others.

The rooftop terrace

The top-floor terrace restaurant and bar look south over the Bacino di San Marco to San Giorgio Maggiore -- one of the few elevated public viewpoints in Venice that is not a bell tower, and the reason non-residents come here at all.