New Sponsor - The Terrace at the Gritti Palace in Venice

(Venice, Italy) The terrace of the Hotel Gritti Palace is a magnetic location, attracting the illustrious and industrious from all over the world. The Gritti terrace has supported the weight of kings and queens, ambassadors and diplomats, movie stars and fashion models, politicians, writers, conductors, composers, architects, artists, designers, intellectuals -- even a Head of State or two.

With its spectacular view of the Grand Canal, it is the dramatic setting for prestigious corporate lunches as well as intimate private dinners. Just a five-minute walk to La Fenice, or ten minutes to the Goldoni, the Gritti terrace is the place where opera and theater lovers congregate before and after the show.

The Gritti terrace is connected by boat to the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido for resident guests of both hotels that allows easy access to the Venice International Film Festival.

Ernest Hemingway often enjoyed a meal and a bottle of Valpolicella on the Gritti terrace, then wandered one floor up to his suite to put the finishing touches on his novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, which was inspired by his relationship with a young Venetian aristocrat, Adriana Ivancich.

Years after Hemingway's death, Adriana wrote her own book about the relationship, White Tower, and in 1980 revealed to People magazine:

She last saw Hemingway in Venice in 1955. They sat on the Gritti terrace overlooking the Grand Canal. It was sunset in one of the world's most beautiful cities. Adriana remembers that tears rolled down the author's cheeks. "Look, daughter," he said. "Now you can tell everyone you saw Ernest Hemingway cry." 

The celebrated English novelist, W. Somerset Maugham, author of "The Razor's Edge" and "Of Human Bondage" often stayed at the Gritti. In a letter dated June 18, 1960, he wrote:

 “There are few things in life more pleasant than to sit on the terrace of the Gritti when the sun about to set bathes in lovely colour the Salute, which almost faces you. You see that noble building at its best and the sight adds to your satisfaction.

For at the Gritti you are not merely a number as you are in those vast caravanserais that are now being built all over the world; you are a friend who has been welcomed as he stepped out of his motor boat, and when you seat down to dinner at the very same table that you sat at the year before, and the year before that, when you see that your bottle of Soave is in the ice-pail, waiting for you, as it has been year after year, you cannot but feel very much at home.”

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