The Salizada San Moisè, Venice’s answer to Madison Avenue or Bond Street, is a sad sight. Right off its namesake square, the once glittering Hotel Bauer is swathed in gauzy white tarpaulins stretched tightly over a scaffolding frame.
We create a place of entire well-being, exclusively for you, proclaims the signage on the ground level of the construction site. But it’s not clear what—if anything—is underway. There hasn’t been any drilling or hammering since late December, when Signa Group, the Austrian real-estate conglomerate that bought the Bauer in 2020, collapsed into insolvency.
