A terracotta-coloured block with pointed windows, iron balconies and a crown of dormers, set back behind trees on the avenue that joins the lagoon to the sea. It belongs to the Lido’s building season of the early twentieth century, but no source we could find gives its date or its architect.
At a glance
The building stands at number 36 of the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, the avenue of some seven hundred metres that the Lido’s first developers laid out from the vaporetto landing on the lagoon to the beach, and that is still the island’s main street of shops and hotels. Set back from the pavement behind a hedge and a row of trees, it is a four-storey apartment house in the neo-Venetian manner that the Lido favoured before and after the First World War: pointed and trefoiled windows, small balconies on brackets, a painted and corbelled cornice and a roof of dormers with a larger one in the middle.
What this page does not say. The Comune’s catalogue of the Lido’s architecture, which documents more than three hundred buildings of the island street by street, has no entry for this address, and we found no other source on it. Its date and its architect are not documented; what follows is what the photograph shows.
Key facts
- Where: Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta 36, Lido di Venezia
- Type: apartment house of four storeys with dormers, in the neo-Venetian manner (as seen in the photograph)
- Date and architect: not documented in any published source found so far
- GPS: 45.4153, 12.3729 · Open in Google Maps (OpenStreetMap)
What is known, and what is believed
The Gran Viale was the spine of the Lido as a bathing resort: a wide, straight avenue from Santa Maria Elisabetta, where the boats from Venice landed, to the beach establishments on the Adriatic, lined within a few decades with hotels, villas and apartment houses, from the Liberty of the Grande Albergo Ausonia Hungaria to the sober blocks of the 1920s. The house at number 36 is one of the apartment buildings of that season, and its vocabulary, with its pointed windows and painted cornice, is the Venetian revival that many Lido builders chose to tie the new island to the old city. When it was built and by whom remains to be documented.
What you see
A tall block in terracotta plaster with stone trim, seen over a hedge and through the trees of the avenue. The upper floors have pairs of windows with pointed, trefoiled heads framed in white, with iron balconies on brackets and flower boxes; the top floor is set under a deep cornice decorated with a band of painted roundels and corbels, and the roof carries a row of small dormers with a larger, gabled one in the centre, itself decorated in the same manner. A street sign for Santa Maria Elisabetta stands at the corner of the garden.
Do you know more about this building?
If you know when the house at Gran Viale 36 was built, who designed it, or its name, write to Sofia at sofia@culturalheritageonline.com or through the contact page. What arrives with a source goes into this page, with your name as the contributor.
Nearby
- Ex sede della Cassa di Risparmio — Ignazio Saccardo’s bank of 1926 at the lagoon end of the avenue
- The building on Via Spalato — the postwar block round the corner
Sources
- Hoppa, Venice Lido, Santa Maria Elisabetta’s area: the Gran Viale as the island’s main street of shops and hotels, some 700 metres long from the lagoon to the sea, with Liberty buildings such as the Grande Albergo Ausonia Hungaria
- Comune di Venezia, Municipalità di Lido-Pellestrina, L’architettura del Lido — elenco edifici (via the Wayback Machine): the catalogue of the island’s historic buildings, which has no entry for this address
- Stefano Vigolo, photograph of 28 September 2014 and map pin sent to the editorial staff on 28 September 2026: the identification of the building. Not a published source
- OpenStreetMap (Nominatim), Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta 36: the address and the position
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