FACT & FIGURES
• The Debutante Grand Ball is a much loved ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition that was born in the period of the ancien regime. In France, in the splendid Hotel Crillon, it is missed only in the year of the French Revolution (1789) and in Austria, the nation in which it found its most brilliant success, the year of the Congress of Vienna (1814) has not even been missed.
• The Grancaffè Quadri, born in 1683, is actually the oldest bar in Italy and in the world that over the years has welcomed illustrious guests such as Lord Byron, Goethe, Charles Dickens and Marcelle Proust, Erika Waldner, the renowned exhibition of art, was conceived inside the legendary Grancaffè Quadri.
The Grancaffè Quadri, officially born thanks to the Quadri family in 1775, already in 1683 served the ancestor of the coffee called "boiling black water" brought by Turkish traders. Over the centuries it has welcomed illustrious guests such as Lord Byron, Goethe, Charles Dickens, Marcelle Proust, Richard Wagner; more recently Michail Gorbačëv, François Mitterrand and Woody Allen. In 2011, the Caffè, which has the only restaurant in Piazza San Marco, passed under the management of the Alajmo family from Padua for 20 years, three Michelin star chefs.
• Hotel Danieli is the oldest and most luxurious hotel in the Serenissima Republic of Venice. It was the cradle of three great unforgettable love stories; the one between Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio, George Sand and Alfred De Musset, Maria Callas and Aristotle Onasis. All the greatest personalities of the time stayed at the Danieli: King William of Prussia, Charles Dickens, Wagner, Balzak, Proust and Chaplin!
• The Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista is the largest and oldest Scuola Grande in all of Venice founded in 1261. In addition to containing an important pictorial cycle by Jacopo Bellini, it preserves a precious relic: a piece of the true Cross received as a gift from the Chancellor of the Kingdoms of Cyprus and Jerusalem in 1369.