Belmond Hotel Cipriani

Venice is a masterpiece you have to share with forty thousand day-trippers. The Cipriani's trick is that it lifts you out of all of it without taking you out of the city. The hotel's own motoscafo collects you at St Mark's and, ninety seconds later, sets you down in three acres of walled gardens where the loudest thing you'll hear is birdsong.

Giuseppe Cipriani, the man who invented the Bellini and the carpaccio over at Harry's Bar, opened this place in 1958 as a refuge for people who could go anywhere and mostly wanted not to be bothered. Sixty-five years on, that is still the whole idea.

The Rooms

Interiors are Venetian in the grown-up sense, all Fortuny fabrics, Murano glass and marble bathrooms, and none of it tips into pastiche. The suites in the Palazzo Vendramin annex come with a butler and a private terrace over the water that is, on its own, worth the trip.

The real luxury here is horizontal. The saltwater pool is one of the largest in Italy, reputedly built the wrong length by mistake, and nobody has ever once complained.

The Verdict

If it's your first time in Venice, stay in the thick of it. If it's your fourth, and you've earned the right to watch the circus from a garden across the water, this is the only address that matters.