A walking with intellectuals in love with Venice

Venice is more than ever a crossroads of international celebrities and an obligatory meeting point of intellectuals from all over the world. Loved and frequented by the biggest names in film, literature, music and art from around the world , Venice is still an ideal place for many celebrities who want to admire its beauty and isolation from the bustle of big cities. Just to give a name , just think that the Giudecca bought home the big music Elton John.

Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal hosted the famous American novelist Henry James, who was on a visit to Venice 15 times .

A Palazzo Cappello, San Polo, resided Lady Layard, Austen Henry Layard ‘s widow , the archaeologist who discovered the ruins of Nineveh, as well as one of the founders, in 1866 , of the Company of Venice and Murano, the company who provided the impetus for the revival of Venetian glass.

The Lady and art collector Marchesa Luisa Casati, a lover of Gabriele D’ Annunzio, bought in 1910 from the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, now home to the Guggenheim Museum . Here she organized mundane events and renowned parties.

The same poet D’ Annunzio stayed in famous little red house, next to Palazzo Corner which is now the seat of the Province of Venice and the Prefecture. It is in Venice that, in 1894 , he broke the love affair with the actress acclaimed worldwide, Eleonora Duse.

Richard Wagner was a client habit of Caffè Lavena in Piazza San Marco. In the company of family and father-in-law Franz Liszt, almost every day he spend the coffee hour in the afternoon , from 5 to 6pm, and took a tea with cookies or a glass of cognac.

Among the owners of Ca ‘ Rezzonico, now a museum of the eighteenth century, there is also the English painter Robert Barret Browning: the palace was chosen as residence by his father , the writer Robert Browning, who died here in 1889.

At Hotel Danieli the famous love story between the French novelist and playwright George Sand and Alfred de Musser was consumed. At Danieli arrives also the actor Charlie Chaplin‘s the hotel is stormed by a flood of fans.

The famous Caffè Florian in Piazza San Marco had among its regulars, just to name a few, Carlo Goldoni, Ugo Foscolo, Goethe , Modigliani, Dickens and Marcel Proust. Floriano Francesconi , founder of the restaurant, was a friend and benefactor of one of the greatest sculptors and performers of classical art, Antonio Canova. To thank him for his generosity , Canova made the model of the foot of the friend who suffered from gout to allow the cobbler to take the action without causing further suffering.

The seducer Casanova studied physics, in the daytime, in the Convento della Salute. Venice is full of his references, starting from the Leads , or the Calle della Commedia , today Malipiero (near Palazzo Grassi ), where the adventurer was born April 2, 1725 . But even Murano knows something : Casanova had in fact a story with a charming enclosed nun in the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Even today you can visit the church .

Ugo Foscolo lived in Venice from 1792 to 1797 in a house in the Campo de le Gate, in the Castello district , where even today there is a plaque commemorating his stay in the lagoon.

The American writer Ernest Hemingway, between 1949 and 1950 became a regular customer of Harry’s Bar , the local historian in San Marco , which is also mentioned several times in his famous novel “Across the River and Into the Trees.”

A Palazzo Barbaro lived Cole Porter before opening his ” jazz club” on a boat docked alla Salute . Always close to Alla Salute, on Calle Querini , has lived for half a century, Ezra Pound, the ” Titan of poetry ” as is written in the plaque that remembers him .