15th-century Gothic architecture, banquet halls draped in gold, and heavy velvet curtains that sprawl open to reveal the Venetian lagoon below, Hotel Danieli was every bit a Bond filming location before the franchise selected its gilded halls for Moonraker.
Long before contemporary audiences saw Venice as one of the defining backdrops for Daniel Craig’s debut feature, Roger Moore's Bond chased a mad billionaire's henchman through its iconic canals and brawled his way through a stained-glass clocktower above St Mark's Square. In the film’s rather dramatic crescendo, Moore even sent a gondola-turned hovercraft straight across the Piazza.
But there was one filming location that defied Moore’s goofier version of Fleming’s source material: a hotel with a truly opulent interior that predates the film by nearly five centuries, that reportedly welcomed Lord Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Dickens, and Marcel Proust through its doors as it emerged as one of the Europe’s most revered and important travel landmarks.
Set on the Riva degli Schiavoni, the hotel has been reimagined as Danieli, Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel, the luxury hotel group’s fourth Italian location and a modern success story for measured restoration done right.
French designer Pierre-Yves Rochon spent years restoring the palazzo's hand-painted, gilded ceilings and marble staircases, while introducing a colour palette of celadon greens, soft blues, terracotta, ochre, and powder pinks, pulled straight from the lagoon outside.
Of course, the hotel still maintains much of the grandeur that made it one of the city’s finest travel destinations, with terrazzo floors and Rubelli textiles offering subtle touches of European luxury, whilst a carefully curated art collection harks back to Venice’s Grand Tour era when the Italian port was the epicentre for art and culture through the 17th and 18th centuries.
Today, the hotel has reopened with 120 rooms and suites across Palazzo Dandolo and Palazzo Casa Nuova, with the room count set to climb to 168 once the group completes the restoration of Palazzo Danieli Excelsior in 2027.
Whether or not there's a stained-glass clocktower fight in your future, the Danieli's second act gives Venice's Bond-era legend a very good reason to check back in.