Palazzo Morosini Brandolin

Palazzo Morosini Brandolin stands on the Grand Canal at the corner of the Rio di San Toma, across the water from Ca' d'Oro, in the Sestiere of San Polo. Built by the Morosini family in the second half of the 15th century, it was designed to rival Ca' Foscari in scale and decoration -- an ambition still visible in its two matching floors of Gothic tracery windows, even though a mid-19th-century demolition cut the building down from its original height.

The building is divided into private flats with people living in them. There is nothing to enter and no reason to try the door on the side canal; the facade is the whole of what is public about it.

The right way to see it is from a scheduled vaporetto, which is already passing. Hiring a boat to look at a private residence adds wash and traffic to one of the busiest stretches of the canal for a view that a one-euro-per-minute ticket gives just as well.

If the comparison with Ca' d'Oro opposite is what brings you here, the museum across the water is the one that takes visitors and funds its own upkeep from them -- a better place to spend an hour than lingering outside a home.

Palazzo Morosini Brandolin is a private residential building, divided into apartments, and is not open to the public. Its Grand Canal facade is best seen from the water, by vaporetto or gondola, across from Ca' d'Oro.