Ca' Foscari Site Features

The facade is a textbook run of Venetian Floral Gothic, and its whole effect comes from two stacked window bands. Each piano nobile carries an eight-light opening -- an ottafora -- across the centre of the front, the upper one with ogee arches and pierced quatrefoil tracery above them, the lower one slightly plainer. Very few Venetian palaces attempt eight lights; most stop at six. The capitals are carved with foliage, animals and grotesque masks, close enough to the water to be read from a passing boat.

Between the two bands runs a marble frieze bearing the Foscari arms and a helmet crowned with a lion -- a direct reference to the doge's role as the Republic's military commander. It sits at the exact centre of the composition, and it is the reason the facade reads as a proclamation of one man's office rather than as decoration.

The building stands on ground that was cleared for it. The Republic sold Francesco Foscari the site of an older building known as the House with the Two Towers in 1453; he demolished it and pushed the new footprint forward so the palace would sit directly on the water, which is why it commands the bend rather than sitting back from it.

Inside, the 20th century is present as well. Carlo Scarpa remodelled the Aula Baratto in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, inserting timber, glass and his own detailing into the Gothic shell without pretending to match it -- one of the most studied modern interventions in a historic Venetian building.

The double octafore

Two eight-light windows stacked one above the other, with the upper tracery pierced into quatrefoils. Seen from the far bank at the bend, they line up as a single vertical panel of stone lace across the middle of the facade.

The Aula Baratto

Carlo Scarpa's hall, facing the Grand Canal, with his characteristic layering of wood, glass and light against the older fabric. It is a lecture room in daily use, and seeing it depends on the university not needing it that morning.

A doge's last address

Francesco Foscari built the palace to display the authority of a thirty-four-year reign, was forced to abdicate in 1457, and died here within days. The building outlasted the point it was made to prove.

The oldest LEED building in the world

Ca' Foscari was certified in 2013 -- a 15th-century Gothic palace meeting 21st-century environmental standards, achieved through what was done behind the facade rather than to it.

Ca' Foscari stands at the volta del Canal, the sharpest bend in the Grand Canal, on the Dorsoduro bank opposite San Toma.

That position is the entire point of the building. A palace on a straight reach is seen side-on and briefly; a palace on the outside of a bend is seen head-on, from a long way off, by everything coming down the canal in either direction. Foscari bought the most conspicuous site in Venice and then built the widest facade he could on it.

The same bend is why the Regata Storica finishes here every September. The machina, the floating grandstand from which the winners are judged, is moored directly in front of the palace, and the building has served as the backdrop to the city's own regatta for centuries.

Immediately alongside stand the two Palazzi Giustinian, built to a closely related design, so the three together present an unbroken run of Gothic facade around the curve -- the longest continuous stretch of it anywhere on the canal.

Behind, the calli lead within a minute to the campi and bacari around San Pantalon and Santa Margherita, which is where the university's daily population actually is.