Beyond Borders

off the
beaten
track
in Venice
Looking beyond its touristy veneer,
Maria Shollenbarger goes on a quest to
uncover Venice’s authentic, living culture.
On a particularly pellucid afternoon last June,
at the tail end of the opening of the 55th
Venice Biennale, I am chatting with Bianca
Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga in her garden
by the Grand Canal. We sit in the shadow
of the Palazzo Papadopoli, the beautiful
16th-century palace that is the ancestral home
of her husband, Giberto; shards of light glint off
the gently ruffled water and reflect on its newly
plastered façade.
photo credit: pixabay.com
Carefully tended gravel borders a
preternaturally perfect lawn at the
garden’s center. Sleek, bleached-oak
tables and steel-wire chairs line its
perimeter; mirrors in dark wood frames
are leaned, one precisely equidistant
from the other, against an immaculate
brick wall. In a city whose reputation
was built on extravagant displays of
wealth—not least among them the
palazzo towering next to us, still one
of the largest privately owned ones on
the Grand Canal—and whose beauty
today is more of a crumbling, decadent
sort, this is a curiously austere space.
But then, the garden isn’t precisely
Arrivabene’s anymore. It is now under
the management of the Singaporebased
Amanresorts, and her husband’s
ancestral home goes by a new name:
Aman Canal Grande.
Not long ago, Arrivabene recalls,
things here skewed decidedly more
toward the shabby chic-end of
the maintenance spectrum, with wisteria
growing in unchecked profusion. No
longer: shabby chic—an aesthetic with
which Amanresorts, as anyone who
has visited one will know, has exactly
zero truck—has left the building. In its
place has come an unassailably tasteful
merger of 21st-century design and
neo-Renaissance and Rococo splendor.
Layered in ornate cornices and original
Murano chandeliers, Aman Canal
Grande’s public salons and 24 suites
were painstakingly refurbished in an
18-month renovation requiring an
average of 100 artisans on site daily.
Elaborate plasterwork and freshly
abluted gilt contrast with angular,
contemporary furniture in gunite
gray, studio white, and other shades
on the not-quite-color wheel. In my
suite, chubby gambol across frescoes
attributed to the school of Tiepolo; on
the piano nobile they are the work of
the master himself, crowning a dining
30 BEYOND BORDERS | September 2017 September 2017 | BEYOND BORDERS 31