Palazzo Grassi Site Features

The courtyard and staircase

Massari's plan is built around an enclosed classical courtyard, unusual on the Grand Canal, where most palaces run a corridor straight from the water gate to the back. Off it rises the ceremonial staircase, its walls and vault frescoed by Michelangelo Morlaiter and Francesco Zanchi -- the most intact surviving 18th-century interior in the building.

Ando's galleries

Tadao Ando's 2006 work is deliberately reversible in feel: white plastered volumes and concrete inserted inside the historic rooms, lit from above, leaving the frescoed ceilings and the courtyard untouched. The result is roughly 5,000 square metres across some forty rooms, and it is usually possible to see where the 18th century stops and the intervention starts.

Rotating exhibitions

There is no permanent display. Shows are drawn from the Pinault Collection and change periodically, sometimes given over entirely to a single living artist -- so what is on the walls bears no relation to the building's own period, and a repeat visit is a genuinely different one.