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"The Glamorous History of Venice's Gritti Palace\nVenice's grandest hotel has played host to an elite parade of guests for decades, including Peggy Guggenheim, Ernest Hemingway, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton\nArt collector and Venice resident Peggy Guggenheim arrives by gondola to the Gritti Palace, where she celebrated her 80th birthday, in 1978. Seated next to her are her daughter-in-law, Peggy Angela Vail, and a longtime friend, art dealer John Hohnsbeen.\nGuggenheim (wearing a Fortuny dress) gathers with friends and family for a birthday photograph in one of the hotel's salons. Hanging on the wall is a copy of Titian's 16th-century portrait of Venetian doge Andrea Gritti, the palace's namesake.\nFashion models wearing the latest designs by Christian Dior pose before a window at the Gritti Palace in 1951. In the distance rises St. Mark's Campanile, the bell tower, completed in 1912, of St. Mark's Basilica.\nDior models put their best foot forward at the entrance to the Gritti Palace in 1951.\nAmerican writer John Dos Passos stayed at the hotel while attending the International PEN Congress in 1957.\nGuggenheim with, from left, playwright Tennessee Williams, painter Kenneth Scott, and Count Henri de La Celle on the rooftop of her 18th-century home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection museum), on Venice's Grand Canal; the Gritti Palace can be seen in the background at right.\nErnest Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, arrive at the Gritti Palace in the 1950s, following an African safari. According to Hemingway biographer Anthony Burgess, the manager of the hotel was stunned by the writer's prodigious consumption of alcohol, observing that \"three bottles of Valpolicella [red wine] first thing in the day were nothing to him.\" Hemingway once staged a midnight baseball game in the hotel's lobby\u2014and instead of being reprimanded, the great American scribe had 10 percent taken off his bill, since nobody had ever played the sport on the premises before.\nA Dior model prepares to board a gondola in front of the Gritti in 1951.\nA circa-1900 hand-colored photograph of a Gritti Palace guest suite outfitted with Venetian furniture, Persian carpets, and acres of damask.\nBritish novelist W. Somerset Maugham (left) chats with a Gritti Palace official in 1959. In the distance, from left, is the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute and the late-19th-century Palazzo Genovese (now the Centurion Palace hotel).\nA vintage postcard featuring the Gritti Palace.\nActress Elizabeth Taylor, wearing an emerald-and-diamond necklace and earrings by Bulgari, dines at the hotel's restaurant with then-husband Richard Burton in 1975."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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