Ca' da Mosto Site Features

Like other Veneto-Byzantine palaces on the Grand Canal, Ca' da Mosto is built with a ground-floor portico opening directly onto the water, and a piano nobile above lit by long galleries of pointed-arch windows. Byzantine-style marble decoration completes the facade.

The building's floors were originally organized by function: the ground floor as a merchandise warehouse, the piano nobile as office and reception space, and the upper floor as living quarters for the merchant family.

The simpler rear facade faces a small courtyard, with a central triple lancet window, an external staircase, and a large vaulted ground-level portal.

The 13th-century arcade

The ground-floor water arcade and the round-arched windows of the first floor above it are the oldest fabric on the building and among the oldest surviving domestic architecture on the Grand Canal. The stilted arches and the patere -- carved marble roundels of animals and crosses set into the wall between them -- are Veneto-Byzantine work reused and rearranged over later rebuildings.

The Leon Bianco

From the 17th century the palace ran as an inn, the White Lion, and became the most prominent in Venice. Emperor Joseph II stayed here under an assumed name in 1769, and the 1782 visit of the sons of Tsar Paul, travelling as the "Counts of the North", was one of the social events of the decade.

Alvise Cadamosto

The navigator born in this house took his name from it -- Cadamosto is simply Ca' da Mosto contracted. Sailing for Portugal between 1455 and 1456 he reached the Gambia and sighted the Cape Verde islands, and his written account is among the earliest first-hand European descriptions of the West African coast.

Ca' da Mosto stands on the outer curve of the Grand Canal in Cannaregio, on the stretch between the Rialto and Ca' d'Oro, with the Rio dei Santi Apostoli running behind it.

Its position on the bend means the facade is visible in near-full elevation from the Rialto side of the canal, which is the only useful way to see it -- the land approach is through narrow calli that give no view of the front at all.

The building sits noticeably lower than its neighbours, its ground-floor arcade close to the waterline. That is partly original design and partly subsidence: the Grand Canal palaces of this period were built before the relative sea level had risen as far as it has, and Ca' da Mosto's water storey now floods routinely during acqua alta.