Gourmet Getaways: What It's Like To Stay At The JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa
Just a short boat ride from Venice's Piazza San Marco, the JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa offers a secluded escape on the private Isola delle Rose. Operating seasonally from March through November, the resort combines Italian luxury accommodations with expansive gardens, olive groves, and refined dining. Its location, overlooking the Venetian Lagoon, offers the best of both worlds, delivering proximity to Venice's historic core as well as a tranquil setting.
Sagra Rooftop Restaurant
The resort's eight dining venues highlight the diversity of Italian cuisine. Cucina, the main restaurant, offers à la carte options and a breakfast buffet featuring homemade pastries, a 'healthy corner,' a variety of hot and cold dishes, and an omelet station. It transforms into a seasonal pizzeria for casual, open-air dining during warmer months.
Sagra Rooftop Restaurant serves dishes inspired by traditional Italian flavors. The family-friendly restaurant is open for dinner and late-night meals and offers panoramic views. Agli Amici Dopolavoro Venezia, led by Michelin-starred chef Emanuele Scarello and his sister Michela, delivers a unique fine dining experience with a pre-fixe menu that includes creative fare such as rose rice with raspberry powder and scallops with zucchini flowers, red bell peppers, and chicken skin chips.
Petit fours at Agli Amici Dopolavoro
For a hands-on culinary experience, the Sapori Cooking Academy offers small-group classes led by seasoned chefs. Participants learn to prepare Italian staples like pasta, risotto, and Venetian desserts. Specialized sessions include olive oil tastings from the resort's century-old grove and guided visits to local markets for fresh ingredients. Class sizes are limited to eight for a personalized experience.
The loft-style Maisonette room is ideal for families.
The resort, housed in a restored former hospital, opened in 2015 and is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. The property contains 266 rooms and suites across five areas: the main building, La Residenza, La Maisonette, L'Uliveto, and the Villa Rose. Designed by Matteo Thun & Partners, accommodations feature high ceilings, garden or lagoon views, and, in select units, private plunge pools. La Maisonette rooms offer loft-style suites with private gardens and plunge pools, while the standalone Villa Rose includes two bedrooms, a private pool, and a secluded garden. Both are well-suited for families or groups.
The JW Marriott Venice Spa features an indoor-outdoor pool overlooing the city's stunning lagoon.
The JW Venice Spa, the city's largest spa, is a centerpiece of the resort, spanning more than 1,750 square meters. The spa's facilities include eight treatment rooms, a spa suite with a private terrace, a hammam, Finnish and bio saunas, indoor and outdoor vitality pools, and dedicated yoga and meditation gardens.
Guests can enjoy a full menu of facials, massages, and body treatments by spa brand partner Maria Galland, including the signature 'Sensory Ritual and Velvet Rose' treatment that takes inspiration from the rose gardens surrounding the spa and resort gardens. The spa also offers a Couple's Spa Experience, featuring side-by-side 50-minute massages in the Spa Suite, followed by an hour of private relaxation with prosecco and fresh fruit.
The resort's recently unveiled padel courts.
Beyond the spa, guests can enjoy three swimming pools, including a family-friendly outdoor pool, an adults-only rooftop infinity pool with panoramic views of Venice, and an indoor-outdoor vitality pool at the spa. Additional amenities include a soccer lawn and courts for basketball, tennis, and pickleball. Two new padel courts recently opened. A complimentary 20-minute shuttle provides regular transport to Venice's city center.
Visiting Venice's historic center is a must. Private tours with operators like The Tour Guy provide skip-the-line access to St. Mark's Basilica—known as the Church of Gold—guide you through St. Mark's Square and winding, boutique-lined streets to the Rialto Bridge, and conclude with a gondola ride along the city's canals.
Explore the boutiques along Le Mercerie, one of Venice's premier shopping streets, and sample cicchetti—traditional small bites like fried mozzarella and arancini. For a quintessential and Instagrammable Venetian experience, visit Caffè Florian, Italy's oldest coffee house, established in 1720. Located just steps from St. Mark's Basilica, it serves robust coffees and decadent hot chocolates. While prices are on the expensive side, the historic atmosphere makes the cafe well worth a visit.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
5 hours ago
- Business Insider
I left my job in tech and moved to Spain. Being alone in a foreign country is hard, but it's changed me for the better.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Parrie Hartley, 30, who moved from Austin to Barcelona in February 2025. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I'm from a really small town outside of Houston, where there are not a lot of employment opportunities. I've always been a city girl at heart, so in 2020, after a brief stint living in Australia, I moved to Austin and started working in software sales. Austin's tech scene is booming. Many, like big corporations, like Amazon, Tesla, and Meta, have opened offices there, bringing with them a lot of jobs. Moving there definitely built my career and made me a lot of money. Living in the city was awesome, too. It's a great place for young people, with an amazing culture, food, and music scene. There are a lot of events, and I definitely made some really great friends there. In May 2024, the startup company I was working for started making layoffs. By then, I had already started thinking about leaving Austin. I had been in the city for five years and was itching for a change. Everything in my life was perfect on paper, but I still missed adventure. I've always been very curious about the world, and I really do think I'm the best version of myself when traveling. At the time, I was 29 and single. I had no husband, job, children, or pets. My parents were healthy, so I didn't really have anything tying me down. I decided, "Why don't I move abroad?" A student visa was my ticket to Spain I had been working in sales, so I had built up quite a bit in savings. But once I decided to move, I sold everything — furniture, clothes, anything that I could get money from. In Austin, I lived alone in a 1,100-square-foot apartment on the East Side, downtown, and paid $1,800 monthly on rent. To save money, I moved back to my hometown and started picking up some shifts at a local boutique. I considered a lot of different places to move abroad. I had already lived in Australia, so I checked that off the list. I'd also been to Asia, which I enjoyed, but I felt that living there might have been too much of a culture shock. So, I began researching visa options for Europe. One option was a student visa, which I discovered could be obtained by enrolling in a language school. The visa was available in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. As a Texan, I didn't feel a strong need to learn Portuguese or Italian. I had also visited Spain when I was 22, during a backpacking trip with friends to Barcelona, and had a great time. I figured that if I moved there, I could learn Spanish and be close to the other European countries I wanted to visit. It took about four weeks to organize all of my paperwork for the visa. I had to obtain an FBI background check, get a medical clearance from a doctor, show proof of health insurance, and submit my bank statements to show that I had sufficient funds in my account. In the end, everything came together, and my visa was approved just three days before my flight to Spain in February. I got lucky finding housing I attend a Spanish language school called Expanish in Spain. I have classes five days a week, four hours a day. The course lasts 40 weeks, with eight weeks of holiday included. I paid $6,800 in total. I live in a neighborhood pretty close to the Church of La Sagrada Família , which is not only the most famous building in Barcelona, but possibly in all of Spain. Since I'm in such a central area, there are a lot of tourists and markets around, but the area itself is still fairly quiet. My building is between three major metro stations. Figuring out the metro was initially a challenge for me as an American, but it turned out to be super easy. I feel safe walking there day or night because the area has low crime. I got really lucky finding an apartment through a rental website called Idealista. They matched me with a couple, and I'm paying €600 ($686) for my room. I pay €10 ($11) a month for WiFi, plus water and electricity, which adds another €40 ($46) a month. The apartment is around 753 square feet and came fully furnished, which was great. We have air conditioning, but unfortunately, it doesn't reach my room, which is rough in the summer. It's easy to make friends in Barcelona Meeting people in Barcelona is easy, and the people are very warm and welcoming. The city is filled with people from all over the world. Most are away from their families, here for a year or two, so eventually, you end up creating your own little family. Often, making friends is as simple as going out and striking up a conversation — if you hear someone speaking English, you just start talking. I've met plenty of people through my language school, though it tends to be a revolving door since it's a temporary program, and most students are only around for three or four months. Outside of school, I've built friendships through Bumble BFF. I also joined a volleyball league when I first got here, and I play regularly. I haven't ventured onto the dating apps just yet. I'm 30, and I do want to build toward a relationship, but I feel like I need to get my life a bit more together first. That said, I'm definitely having fun meeting people. I've met guys from Brazil, the Netherlands, and Colombia — it's been a really fun mix. Honestly, it feels a bit like being a kid in a candy store. Moving here was the right choice for my future Most of my time here has been really positive. I spend a lot of time at the beach, and I'm walking up to 20,000 steps a day. You can really see the difference in my face. I've also been traveling. In July, I visited Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. My round-trip flight was only €40 ($45.72). I just packed a backpack with bikinis and went. This month, I'm also heading to Mallorca because I scored free tickets to the Love Island UK finale. Right now, I earn money tutoring both kids and adults in English during after-school hours. I'm also helping my cousin, a lawyer in Texas, with some administrative work. My current visa is valid for one year and will expire in early February 2026. I'd love to stay longer, so I'm exploring the option of applying for a digital nomad visa. It's available in several European countries and essentially allows you to live and work remotely, as long as you meet certain income requirements and have health insurance. As for moving back to the US, I don't plan on it, at least not if I don't have to. Of course, there are cultural challenges that come with living abroad, especially in a place where you don't know the language or the people. I also miss my family, and get a little sad when I miss family events or big moments in their lives and can't be there in person. But I've come to realize that life keeps moving — both for them and for me. My motto is: you choose your hard. For me, marriage and raising a child right now would be difficult. For someone else, it might be moving overseas alone without knowing the language. But that's the kind of hard I'd gladly choose any day.
Chicago Tribune
11 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Adventure begins at home for architecture buffs who want to explore the Elgin area
If a staycation is on the schedule for this summer, Explore Elgin has created an 'Architecture Adventure' designed to appeal to residents and visitors alike. The three-day itinerary is one of nine tours that tourism branch of the Elgin Area Convention and Visitors Bureau put together to encourage people to check out what the city and its environs has to offer. Each itinerary includes places to stay, dine and explore in the communities it receives funding to promote: Elgin, Bartlett, Burlington, Carpentersville, East Dundee, Gilberts, Hampshire, Pingree Grove, Sleepy Hollow, South Elgin and West Dundee. While other 'adventures' encourage visits to places with scenic beauty, great fishing, underground art and other attractions, the architecture tour is designed for those wanting to dive into the history of the Elgin area through its buildings. 'The area has several unique buildings and beautiful architectural features that call us back to a different time and place,' said Mary Dulabaum, the convention and visitors bureau's marketing and community outreach manager. 'We try to call attention to remarkable and unusual buildings, often raising awareness of some locations that even long-term residents may not know about,' she said. 'We also highlight locations where the current owners are willing to have the attention and even offer tours.' If you follow the suggested three-day itinerary, it will recommend a visit to BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a Hindu temple in Bartlett, on the first day. Dulabaum calls the traditional place of worship that opened in 2005 a must-see. It was built in the traditional style using hand-carved Italian marble and Turkish limestone, she said. No trip to Elgin is complete without a trip to downtown historic district, which has architecture dating back to the 1800s, Dulabaum said. Its architectural highlights include the Elgin Tower building, Elgin Professional building and Elgin National Watch Co. Observatory. Day two takes visitors to the Elgin History Museum located in 'Old Main,' a Greek Revival-style building that dates back to 1856 and features exhibits illuminating different aspects of the city's development and changes over the years. Another recommendation is the Elgin Public Museum and Lord's Park pavilion in Lords Park. The museum, with exhibits on natural history and anthropology, was built in 1907 and is the oldest museum building in Illinois still in use as a museum. After that, head out to Hampshire to see the only farmhouse designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Tours of the Muirhead Farmhouse are available but must be made online with a three-day notice. On the third day, take a walking tour of the homes listed on the National Register of Historic Places found in the city's historical districts, which run the gamut from painted ladies to houses ordered through the Sears catalog. 'Our main priority is to call attention to destination-style architecture that we think visitors would drive in to see,' Dulabaum said. '(The idea is to) lead someone who is not familiar with our area around so they can explore. We want them to spend a weekend exploring our region and have so much to do that they stay overnight in one of our hotels.' Explore Elgin's Architecture Adventure itinerary is available on its website, and as part of the convention and visitors bureau's new brochure.
Epoch Times
13 hours ago
- Epoch Times
Pregnant Wife of Former NBA Player Attacked by Shark While Swimming in Puerto Rico
The wife of former NBA power forward Danilo Gallinari reveals she was attacked by a shark while vacationing in Puerto Rico. Italian journalist Eleonora Boi, 39, who is also currently pregnant with the couple's third child, was bitten on July 31 while swimming at the Carolina Resort beach.
