Over a hundred-plus years of existence, everyone has managed to visit here - from Winston Churchill to George Clooney.
Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort opened more than a century ago - in 1908. The Italian politician Nicola Spada commissioned the famous Venetian architect Giovanni Sardi to build a large-scale project on a deserted golden beach. Sardi added elements of the Moorish style to the typical La Belle Époque, and new engineering techniques allowed the construction of huge domes. We would like to see the beach party, which was held in honor of the opening - more than 3,000 guests from all over the world came to it (famous and notable, of course).
It became even more interesting here in the 1930s: in 1932, Italian authorities organized the world's first international film festival. And they opened it right there - on the terrace of Excelsior - with the film “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Ruben Mamulyan. Among the guests were Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, James Cagney, Joan Crawford and Boris Karloff. The brainchild of Mussolini, the Venice Film Festival over the years of its existence, went through a lot and came to us (fortunately) in a completely different format. But Excelsior continues to be strongly associated with it - the lion's share of celebrity migrating to Lido every autumn stops here. Over the past century, not only filmmakers (from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp), but also heads of state and royal families (for example, Winston Churchill or the Belgian king Albert II) managed to visit the hotel.
Venice, as you know, is often flooded, and the hotel was once unlucky: the 1966 flood severely damaged not only the objects on the beach, but also the interiors. The current lobbies and halls have survived from the restoration of the late 1960s. Since then, Excelsior has only grown good: in the course of several renovations, new rooms were added (for example, facing the courtyard with fountains, greenery and the architecture of Cordoba and Granada), interiors (tapestries and spacious showers), updated facades. Large-scale renovation, which began in 2018, will end in 2021. But the hotel, of course, continues to work as usual. Therefore, if you decide to go to the Venice Film Festival or Biennale, then for a full immersion in the history of Lido you can’t imagine a better place.