Palazzo Dolfin Manin Site Features

The ground floor arcade -- six arches carried on seven pilasters -- runs the length of the Grand Canal facade, echoed above by a row of windows on the piano nobile framed by Ionic half-columns, and a second row on the upper floor framed by Corinthian half-columns, with a wide multi-light window at the center of each level. A deep, dentil-molded roof overhang finishes the composition at the top.

Inside, the palace once held paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo, created between about 1725 and 1740, possibly connected to the 1748 marriage that joined the Manin family to the Grimani. Some ceiling paintings and stuccowork survive in rooms from the Selva-era renovation, the work of decorators including Jacopo Guarana, Costantino Cedini, and Giuseppe Bernardino Bison.

The arcade the Republic imposed

The ground-floor walkway is the palace's oddest feature and was not Dolfin's idea. The Republic's magistrates required him to carry the public fondamenta straight through the base of his new house, and he objected and lost -- so the Riva del Carbon passes underneath the building rather than around it. It remains one of very few Grand Canal palaces a visitor can walk through the ground floor of without entering it.

Sansovino's first Venetian palace

The facade of 1538-47 applies a Roman order to a Venetian house: Ionic half-columns on the piano nobile, Corinthian above, and white Istrian stone throughout. Several historians treat it as Sansovino's earliest palace commission in the city, which makes it the point where Venetian domestic building starts to look Roman rather than Byzantine.

The last doge's rooms

Ludovico Manin bought the palace with his brother in 1787, ten years before he presided over the Republic's vote to dissolve itself. He returned here afterwards and died in these rooms in 1802, out of public life -- so the building is both the address of a doge and the address where the office ended.

What is no longer here

The Tiepolo paintings the Manin commissioned are gone, as is the family library, once among the most important in Venice and dispersed in the 19th century. Ceilings and stuccowork by Guarana, Cedini and Bison survive from the Selva remodelling, behind a facade that gives no sign either way.

The palace occupies a long stretch of the Riva del Carbon, on the San Marco bank of the Grand Canal, a minute's walk south of the Rialto Bridge.

This was the commercial heart of the canal rather than its ceremonial end. The Riva del Carbon takes its name from the coal unloaded here, and the palace was deliberately built where the working traffic of the Rialto passed -- which is also why the authorities were unwilling to let a private house block the quay.

The facade is unusually long and low for the Grand Canal, and it sits on a straight reach rather than a bend, so it is read side-on from the water rather than face-on. From the opposite bank at Riva del Vin the whole run of six arches is visible at once, which is the only place it can be.

On foot the building is easy to walk past entirely, because the route along the Riva del Carbon goes under it: pedestrians experience the arcade as a covered stretch of pavement, not as a palace.