Doge's Palace Site Features

The Sala del Maggior Consiglio

The Great Council chamber is the palace's largest room and the clearest physical expression of how Venice governed: an assembly hall built for well over a thousand voting patricians, with no throne and no single focal seat of power. Tintoretto's Paradiso covers the end wall, and the portrait frieze of doges runs above -- including the blacked-out panel where Marin Falier's likeness was removed after his execution in 1355.

The Secret Itineraries

A separate guided route leads through the parts of the building the public rooms were designed to conceal: the chancellery, the interrogation room, the attic cells known as the Piombi beneath the lead roof, and the timber structure above the council chamber ceilings. Casanova was imprisoned in the Piombi and escaped through the roof in 1756, the only successful escape from them on record.

The Giants' Staircase

In the courtyard, Sansovino's monumental staircase is flanked at its head by his colossal statues of Mars and Neptune, representing Venetian authority over land and sea. Doges were crowned at its summit -- a ceremonial route ordinary citizens did not use.