Palazzo Falier Site Features

The palace's ground floor rests on an arcade of six arches running parallel to the Rio dei Santi Apostoli, a hallmark of the Byzantine-influenced style that shaped Venice's earliest grand houses. Two upper floors carry the building's main window arrangement: each was originally a pentafora, a five-part window opening, though the leftmost arch on each floor has since been bricked up, leaving four-part quadriforas in its place today.

Later centuries added their own layer to the facade. Carved stone reliefs and paired Gothic shields from the 13th and 15th centuries sit across the front of the building, decorative additions layered onto the older Byzantine structure rather than a single, unified design.

The bricked-up windows

Both upper floors were built with pentafore -- five-light openings -- and on each the leftmost arch has been filled in, leaving four. The blocked arches are still legible in the stonework, so the facade carries the evidence of its own alteration rather than hiding it.

The paterae

Carved stone roundels and Gothic shields were added across the front in the 13th and 15th centuries, three or four hundred years after the wall behind them. They sit slightly awkwardly on the Byzantine arcade, which is exactly what makes the building useful: it is a single facade with three separate periods still visible at once.

The doge with no portrait

Marin Falier was elected in September 1354 and executed in April 1355, the only doge put to death by the Republic. In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio at the Doge's Palace his portrait is replaced by a painted black cloth carrying an inscription recording his crime -- a deliberate erasure kept on permanent display, and the reason this modest side-canal palace is remembered at all.

The palace stands on the Rio dei Santi Apostoli in Cannaregio, on a side canal rather than the Grand Canal, a minute from Campo Santi Apostoli and the Strada Nova.

Its position explains its survival. This was a well-connected address in the 11th century, close to the Rialto without being on the ceremonial waterfront, and it was never grand enough to be worth demolishing for something newer -- which is why an arcade of that age is still standing here and almost nowhere else.

It is seen at close range or not at all. The canal is narrow, there is no campo in front, and the facade can only be taken in from the fondamenta opposite or from the bridge -- so unlike a Grand Canal palace it was never designed to be read from a distance.

The Strada Nova a few metres away is one of the busiest walking routes in Venice, cut through in the 1870s; the palace sits just far enough off it to be missed by nearly everyone using it.