Gondola and dinner at Aman Venice

A private gondola through the small canals, then aperitif and dinner inside a sixteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal: an evening at Aman Venice, reached the only way it was ever meant to be reached.

The arrival is the experience

Palazzo Papadopoli has two entrances. There is a door on a small street at the back, which is how deliveries arrive. And there is the water entrance on the Grand Canal, which is how the family who built it in the 1550s came home.

The gondola collects you and takes about thirty minutes through the narrow canals — the ones the vaporetti cannot enter, where the sound is your own oar and somebody’s television through a window — before turning out into the Grand Canal and slowing at the palace steps. You step off the boat directly into the hall. Nobody who has done it forgets the sequence, and it cannot be reproduced by arriving on foot.

Aperitif, then Arva

A private aperitif is waiting: champagne, and the particular quiet of a palace that is still, in every way that matters, a private house. The piano nobile has frescoes by Tiepolo and the gilded rooms have been left as they were rather than restored into a hotel lobby.

Dinner follows at Arva, the palace’s restaurant — three courses with wine pairing throughout, built on Italian produce with the restraint that makes it work. In summer the table is set in the garden overlooking the Grand Canal: there are perhaps four private gardens on that water, and this is one of them.

What the evening includes

• Private gondola, approximately 30 minutes, through the small canals to the water entrance
• English-speaking guide for an hour, so the route is narrated rather than simply travelled
• Private aperitif on arrival
• Three-course dinner at Arva with wine pairing
• Approximately three hours in total

Practical

• Available May to September, with garden service in the summer months
• Arranged around your group’s size; it works beautifully for four
• Book well ahead: the palace has a limited number of tables and Venice fills from May
• Kosher requirements can be discussed — tell me your family’s standard at the start rather than at the end, and I will tell you honestly what is possible
• Pairs naturally with the Jewish Venice tour of the ghetto and the synagogues by day, or a full day on the lagoon. The story of the ghetto — the first in the world, 1516 — is here

Questions people ask

Can you arrive at Aman Venice by gondola?
Yes — the palace has a water entrance on the Grand Canal, and on this evening the gondola takes you there through the small canals and stops at the steps.

How long is the gondola ride?
About thirty minutes, with an English-speaking guide for the first hour of the evening.

When is it available?
May to September. In the summer months dinner is served in the garden overlooking the Grand Canal.

How long does the whole evening take?
Approximately three hours, including the gondola, the aperitif and a three-course dinner with wine pairing at Arva.

Can kosher requirements be accommodated?
Tell me your family’s standard when we start planning and I will tell you honestly what can be arranged and what cannot. Venice has a small kosher infrastructure, and it is better to know early.