Venice landmarks for sale

Telegraph:

Magnificent mansions, embellished with gothic arches and carved stone balconies, are being sold to the highest bidder, with the majority being turned into hotels.

Several of them look directly on to the Grand Canal, the historic waterway which winds through the heart of what was once known as La Serenissima (The Most Serene).

However, preservation groups say that converting so many palaces into hotels does not make economic sense because Venice's existing hotels are struggling to fill their rooms, and that the trend risks turning the city into even more of a tourist ghetto, devoid of other economic activity.

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"Maintaining these old buildings, as well as the canal banks on which they sit, is very, very expensive," said a spokeswoman for Venice city council. "We don't have the money to do it because funding from the government has been cut in order to pay for the flood barrier." Among the grand mansions being sold off are the Palazzo Soranzo Piovene on the Grand Canal, which was turned into a hotel; the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a former post office which is to be converted into a Benetton superstore; and the salmon-pink Palazzo Sagredo, a private home which is now a hotel.

"In just nine years, the number of hotel beds in Venice increased from 14,000 to 26,000," said Francesca Bortolotto-Possati, whose family has run the five star Hotel Bauer since the 1930s.

"It's ridiculous – occupancy rates are down to about 50 per cent and some hotels are close to bankruptcy because they can't fill their rooms. Rather than having more hotels, we should encourage companies and cultural foundations to use these old palazzos as their headquarters in Venice."

The palazzos are standing empty because banks, post offices and government offices have decamped en masse to the mainland city of Mestre, a few miles across the marshy lagoon, where the majority of Venice's population lives.

I am surprised that lenders would finance Venice hotels in this economic climate. It makes about as much sense as the subprime housing market in the US made. I don't think foundations are the answer either since they usually are tax exempt. It is going to take some creativity to make these properties valuable again. They should consider marketing them as second homes for the wealthy of Europe.