History

The Hotel La Calcina owes its name to the warehouse of the ‘limestone sellers’ that, in the distant seventeenth century, was located within its walls and caused the frequent passage of boats laden with stones and lime under the nearby bridge, now known as Ponte della Calcina (the lime mortar bridge).

With the passage of time, the old warehouse became lodgings, an inn, a guest house and then a hotel, currently among the Historical Places of Italy and the European Historic Cafés, appreciated by at least a couple of centuries by travelers around the world and by writers such as the French André Suarés and Philippe Sollers and John Ruskin, who made it his home in the spring of 1877.

Mentioned in the writing of Buisine and other artists of the twentieth century, the guest house and its cafe, overlooking the Giudecca Canal, have attracted poets, artists and writers such as the Istrian Bortolo Giannelli, the painter Bice Volpi, Giuseppe Berto and Francesco Maria Piave, famous librettist of the works of Giuseppe Verdi, to this part of Venice.
Many prestigious guests are regular visitors to La Calcina, including the renowned singer and actress Ornella Vanoni, Professor Carlo Rubbia, 1984 Nobel Prize for physics, and Count Filippo Foscari Widmann Rezzonico.

The Restaurant La Calcina, with its beautiful terrace on the water, was known until a short time ago as Caffè La Piscina, in memory of the Passoni Pool beach resort, which, until the 1960s was a place for playing water polo, swimming and a meeting place for many Venetians looking for recreation on the shores of the Zattere.