Palazzo Grimani (Santa Maria Formosa) Site Features

The remarkable thing about Palazzo Grimani is that it is not laid out like a Venetian palace at all. Venetian houses are organised around a long central hall running from the water door to the back, with rooms off either side and a small light-well for a courtyard. Giovanni Grimani had a Roman palace built instead: a real cortile with a marble colonnade, rooms arranged around it, and an oval staircase rising through the building.

He could do this because the site is inland, on a calle rather than the Grand Canal, with no water frontage to organise the plan around and enough adjoining ground to buy. The south and west wings he added in the 1560s made the courtyard possible.

The Tribuna is the centre of the whole design. It is a tall, square, coffered chamber lit from above through a lantern, built to hold more than 130 ancient sculptures in purpose-made niches and on shelves rising up the walls -- with the light falling from overhead onto marble, exactly as it does in Rome's Pantheon, which Grimani took as his model.

The earlier decoration is by different hands and shows it: Francesco Salviati and Giovanni da Udine did the classical stuccowork and frescoes around 1539-40, and Federico Zuccari and Camillo Mantovano the second-floor rooms in the 1560s. The building is a sequence of Roman ideas imported into Venice over thirty years by one family.

The Tribuna is the palace's signature space: a vaulted, coffered, Pantheon-inspired chamber with niches and shelves built specifically to hold ancient statues and busts, lit from above through a central lantern. Elsewhere, look for the marble-colonnaded courtyard, the oval staircase, and Federico Zuccari's and Camillo Mantovano's frescoes across the palace's second floor.

The palace stands in Castello, on the Ruga Giuffa near Campo Santa Maria Formosa, ten minutes' walk from Piazza San Marco and completely invisible from any of the routes that lead to it.

There is no canal facade and no approach from the water. The entrance is a door on a narrow calle, and the building gives almost nothing away from outside -- which is why a palace of this importance is missed by nearly everyone walking past it.

That inland position is the reason the architecture works. Grimani was free to plan around a courtyard rather than a canal, and the palace turns inward: the sequence goes from an unremarkable street door into a colonnaded court and then up to the Tribuna, with the surprise held back until the visitor is well inside.

Campo Santa Maria Formosa, a minute away, is one of the larger and more genuinely used squares in Castello -- a market in the morning, benches, children, and a church of its own -- and it makes the natural approach on foot.