Venetian Hotel and Casino

This theme hotel re-creates Italy's most romantic city with meticulous reproductions of Venetian landmarks. From the Strip you enter through the Doge's Palace, set on a walkway over a large lagoon. Inside, Renaissance characters roam the public areas, singing opera, performing mime, jesting, even kissing hands. Walking from the hotel lobby into the casino is one of the great experiences in Las Vegas: overhead, reproductions of famous frescoes, highlighted by 24-karat-gold frames, adorn the ceiling; underfoot, the geometric design of the flat marble floor provides an Escher-like optical illusion of climbing stairs. The Venetian is renowned for having many of the city's leading high-end restaurants and shops, and some of the amenities here are downright breathtaking: the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum shows rotating exhibits from the Guggenheim and Hermitage collections; the Canyon Ranch Spa Club offers the same lavish treatments as the spa resort's main campuses in Arizona and Massachusetts; and Grand Canal Shoppes has noted boutiques such as Burberry, Jimmy Choo, and Sephora. A nice range of hip restaurants and bars has helped up the trend factor here in recent years.