Giovanni Sardi, Nicolo Spada and the Grand Hotel Excelsior

Robin Saikia assesses the enduring legacy of a Venetian entrepreneur and his imaginative architect.

Overlooking the Adriatic Sea on the Venice Lido, the Excelsior was opened in 1908 and is without doubt one of the most glamorous hotels in the world. A jubilantly eclectic riot of cupolas, towers, terraces and battlements, it is a permanent symbol of unrepentant luxury and cosmopolitan joie-de-vivre. Its favoured position – minutes to Venice by motorboat but seemingly a world away from the touristic hurly-burly of the Piazza San Marco – has made it for over a hundred years the favoured retreat of international high society. Notable guests have included Winston Churchill, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Hutton, John Steinbeck, Ingrid Bergman and the Aga Khan.

The Excelsior was the brainchild of the Venetian entrepreneur Nicolo Spada, head of the CIGA hotel consortium and the driving force behind the development of Lido as an upmarket international resort at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later the hotel continued to flourish thanks to another dynamic Venetian, the politican and businessman Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, who chose it as the venue for the first Venice Film Festival, held in 1932. Today, the heritage is kept alive by Leone Jannuzzi, the General Manager and very much the spiritual and aesthetic heir of Spada and Volpi. But the unique style of the building is attributable to the remarkable collaboration between the two men who worked on the project at the outset, the architect Giovanni Sardi and his patron, Nicolo Spada.

First-time visitors to the Excelsior – both before and after the recent and spectacular refurbishment – are always struck by the exuberant sense of space, the sheer scale of the building inside and out, a grandeur of scale as much in evidence in the suites as in the public spaces. Spada had chosen as his architect a fellow Venetian, Giovanni Sardi, who had made his name with the unimpeachable if slightly unambitious neo-Gothic Bauer-Grünwald Hotel on the Grand Canal. The two men enjoyed a close working relationship and for both of them the Excelsior project turned out to be that rare thing, an ideal partnership between client and architect, uninhibited by questions of cost (the budget was seemingly unlimited) and stimulated by compatible objectives. Spada wanted the building to be something rather more than a straightforward, typically Venetian, Gothic or Classical pastiche; Sardi wanted to break free from the constraints that had been necessarily imposed on him in the Bauer-Grünwald project, where the building had had to fit in with its revered neighbours on the Grand Canal. The finished hotel on Lido, they agreed, should be unmistakably Venetian in feel, yet sufficiently cosmopolitan to please its international clientele. It should have all the familiar components of luxury that guests would have enjoyed in the hotels of Cairo, Paris, Baden-Baden and Monte Carlo, but there should also be an extra frisson, an element of surprise that would make the Excelsior an overnight name and draw in the international set. Finally, in a departure from the somewhat stuffy constraints of the nineteenth century, the hotel should have an element of fun and uplift, a move away from the somewhat forbidding, if elegant, feel of the great European spas and sanatoria. There should, for example, be a marked contrast to the Classical elegance of the Hotel des Bains, built in 1900 by Sardi’s respected fellow architect Francesco Marsich. The resulting extravaganza, a resounding success for both Spada and Sardi, was completed in a little under 18 months and opened in July 1908 with a memorable party attended by over 3000 guests.

Today the Excelsior has a comprehensive range of amenities including a swimming pool, gym, tennis courts and water-sports. The rooms, recently redecorated and refurbished, are spacious and elegant but retain the ravishing Iberian-Moorish style of the hotel’s hey-day, with sumptuous furnishings and intricate woodwork. All rooms have either balconies or terraces and overlook the sea, gardens or the lagoon. The Excelsior has several exceptional places to eat. The Tropicana Restaurant and Terrace is elegant, sophisticated; the menu comprises Italian and International cuisine with the accent on fish and sea food. This is an elegant place to dine by candlelight, overlooking the sea. The informal Taverna Restaurant, under shady vines, serves breakfast and light lunches directly on the beach.