Palazzo Fontana Rezzonico Site Features

The palace was built in the Renaissance style but acquired Baroque details over time, giving its facade a noticeably asymmetrical appearance at first glance.

Two portals open onto the water at ground level -- the main one centered beneath the quadruple window of the piano nobile, and a smaller second one set at the extreme right of the facade. The two main floors above are laid out almost identically, each combining the quadruple window with single and grouped round-arched windows fitted with small protruding balconies. Two small obelisks, made almost entirely of terracotta, top the roofline.

The birthplace of a pope

Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico was born here in 1693, while his newly ennobled family were renting the palace and their own far larger one was still being built. He became Clement XIII in 1758 -- one of only a handful of Venetians ever elected pope, and the reason a comparatively modest Cannaregio palace carries the Rezzonico name at all.

The two water gates

The facade has two portals onto the canal rather than the usual one: the main gate centred beneath the piano nobile window, and a smaller second at the far right. The asymmetry is functional -- the palace occupies a corner site at the mouth of the Rio di San Felice, so it needed access from both the Grand Canal and the side canal.

The terracotta obelisks

Two small obelisks stand on the roofline, made almost entirely of terracotta rather than stone. Roof obelisks on a Venetian palace conventionally signalled the home of an admiral or a sea captain; here they are a later Baroque addition to a Renaissance building, and part of why the facade reads as layered rather than of one date.

The palace stands on the Grand Canal in Cannaregio, on the outside of the bend where the Rio di San Felice joins it, a short way upstream of Ca' d'Oro.

That corner position is what shapes the building. Having water on two sides gave it a second frontage and a second water gate, but also fixed its footprint -- it could not expand sideways the way a mid-block palace could, which is one reason the Rezzonico eventually built elsewhere rather than enlarging here.

It is best seen from the water, and specifically from a boat heading downstream, where the facade opens out as the canal turns. From land it is glimpsed rather than seen: the fondamenta along the Rio di San Felice gives an oblique view of the flank, and there is no vantage point that takes in the whole front.