Palazzo Soranzo Site Features

The two wings of Palazzo Soranzo were built roughly a century apart, yet share a single, unified facade and matching stone color. The older, mid-14th-century wing sits at one end, with two asymmetrical, round-topped portals typical of the period before Venetian Gothic took hold. The newer wing, from the 15th century, has just one portal, set beside a small lunette window, and is easy to pick out by its different fenestration.

Both wings carry the pointed, ogee-topped windows that define Venetian Gothic architecture, rather than the rounded arches of earlier Byzantine-influenced buildings. The older wing's two piano nobile floors each have a quadruple window in a carved marble frame, decorated with reliefs of fauns and other mythological figures. The newer wing's main floor carries a wider, eight-part window with its own marble tracery, while the floor above echoes the four-part windows of the older half.

Little survives of the original interiors. Furnishings and works of art were once recorded inside, including a work attributed to Giorgione, but most of this has since been lost or dispersed.

The eight-light window

The 15th-century wing's piano nobile carries a single window of eight lights in a carved marble frame -- an unusually wide opening even for a Gothic palace, and the feature that lets the newer half be told from the older at a glance.

Fauns in the window frames

The older wing's quadruple windows are framed in carved marble with reliefs of fauns and other mythological figures. Classical subjects on a mid-14th-century Venetian house are early, and they repay looking at from directly below rather than across the campo.

Two portals, no symmetry

The older wing has two round-topped doorways placed without regard for each other, a survival from before Venetian Gothic settled into its conventions. The newer wing has one, beside a small lunette. Nothing about the front lines up, and it was never meant to.

The doorbell plate

The bell plate carries an engraved ducal horn -- the corno ducale worn by the doges -- a quiet reference by the family's descendants to Giovanni Soranzo, doge from 1312 to 1328. It is the smallest thing on the building and the only part still making a claim.

The palace occupies most of one side of Campo San Polo, the largest square in Venice after Piazza San Marco, in the sestiere of San Polo.

The campo's odd, curving shape is the reason the facade reads as it does. A canal, the Rio Sant'Antonio, ran along the front of the building until it was filled in 1761 -- so the palace was designed to be approached by water and is now met on foot, across an expanse of open pavement it was never meant to face.

That accident gives the building something almost no Venetian palace has: room to stand back from. Most Gothic facades of this quality can only be seen from a boat or a narrow calle; this one can be looked at from eighty metres away, which is why it is one of the most legible in the city.

Campo San Polo is a working square rather than a monument -- children play football in it, it holds an open-air cinema in summer and one of the larger Carnival gatherings in winter, and the palaces around it are lived in.