Palazzo dei Dieci Savi Site Features

The palace has two facades of very different character. The long side, facing the Ruga degli Orefici, is fronted by a portico of 37 arches, its cross-vaulted ceiling covered in frescoes that survive in largely good condition. Above, two upper floors -- separated by heavy cornices -- carry 37 mullioned windows in plain, undecorated stone frames, capped by a mullioned attic level at the very top.

The shorter Grand Canal facade echoes the same vocabulary at a smaller scale: four ground-floor arcades below five pairs of rectangular mullioned windows. The building's only real decorative flourishes are a 16th-century statue of Justice at a second-floor corner and the 1848 Lion of St. Mark relief marking its brief moment of revolutionary history.

Thirty-seven arches

The portico along the Ruga degli Orefici runs to 37 arches, with the 37 mullioned windows above repeating the count on each upper floor. The building's whole effect is arithmetic rather than ornament -- a government office expressing itself through repetition.

The frescoed vaults

The cross-vaults inside the portico still carry their frescoes in largely good condition. They are directly overhead on a public walkway that thousands of people pass under daily without looking up.

The 1848 lion

A bas-relief Lion of St Mark was cut into the facade during the Republic of San Marco, Daniele Manin's revolutionary government, which lasted seventeen months before the Austrians retook the city. It is a piece of an uprising left on a tax office.

Justice on the corner

A 16th-century statue of Justice stands at a second-floor corner -- the appropriate figure for a building put up to house the magistrates who assessed and collected the Republic's taxes.

The palace stands at the foot of the Rialto Bridge on the San Polo bank, with its long side on the Ruga degli Orefici -- the goldsmiths' street -- and its short end on the Grand Canal.

This is the most valuable administrative address the Republic had. Rialto was the financial quarter, and putting the tax magistrates here placed them among the banks, the goldsmiths and the merchants whose wealth they were assessing.

The portico is not decoration but circulation. It carries the walking route off the bridge into the market district, so the building is one that everyone passes through rather than past -- the ground floor is a public street with offices above it.

Beyond it the Rialto market district opens out: the Erberia, the Pescheria and the porticoed ranges Scarpagnino built after the 1514 fire, by the same architect as this building and in the same campaign.

The Grand Canal end gives the palace a second, much shorter facade on the water, seen from the bridge and from every passing boat.