Palazzo Pisani Moretta Site Features

The facade is built in a flamboyant Venetian Gothic style, with arched doorways opening directly onto the Grand Canal and mullioned, pointed-arch windows spanning two floors above.

Inside, Baroque-era decoration replaced much of the building's original Gothic interior, and a grand double staircase leads up to the piano nobile.

The palace's interior once displayed major works by Venetian artists including Tiepolo, Francesco Guarana, and Filippo Angeli, alongside a ceiling by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini -- though its two best-known works, a Veronese painting and the Pellegrini ceiling itself, have both since left Venice for museums abroad.

Recent restoration has recovered much of the palace's original furnishing, and its rooms are now best known for their Murano glass chandeliers and surviving Tiepolo ceiling work.

Each year during the Venetian Carnival, the palace hosts Il Ballo del Doge, one of the city's most elaborate masquerade balls.

The palace stands on the outer bend of the Grand Canal in San Polo, on the stretch between the Rialto and the Ca' Foscari turn, with Palazzo Tiepolo on one side and Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza on the other.

Its position on the curve is the reason the facade is visible in near-full elevation from some way down the canal, rather than only in sharp perspective as with palaces on the straighter reaches -- one of the practical advantages that made this stretch desirable to build on.

There is no meaningful land approach. Like most Grand Canal palaces of its period, the building was designed around its water gate, and the calli behind it are narrow service routes rather than a formal entrance, which is why the palace is still best seen from a vaporetto crossing between San Tomà and Sant'Angelo.