Palazzo Vendramin Calergi Site Features

Mauro Codussi's facade of the 1480s is the moment the Grand Canal stops being Gothic. Instead of a screen of pointed tracery it presents three storeys of paired round-headed windows arranged in calm, regular bays between engaged columns -- Corinthian above, each order carried consistently across the full width -- a Roman grammar applied to a Venetian house for the first time at this scale. Its symmetry and restraint mark it as one of the key transitional buildings between Venetian Gothic and the fuller Renaissance that followed.

The proportions are what make it calm rather than merely correct. The window pairs sit inside larger round arches, the columns are spaced to the same rhythm on every floor, and the horizontal cornices are strong enough to read from across the water. Nothing here is doing anything surprising, which was the surprise.

Across the frieze runs the family motto Non nobis Domine non nobis -- "not to us, Lord, not to us" -- carved into a facade that cost the Loredan family a reported 200,000 ducats. The line is Psalm 115 and it is a claim to humility made at maximum expense.

Codussi began in 1481 and died before the work was done; the Lombardo family of architects finished it in 1509, twenty-eight years after it started. Behind the palace, unusually for the canal, there is a real garden.

Wagner's rooms

The composer rented the piano nobile from September 1882 and died in these rooms on 13 February 1883. The apartments now hold the Wagner Museum, built around the Josef Lienhart Collection of letters, scores and memorabilia -- visitable on Saturday mornings by appointment, which makes it one of the least-seen museums in Venice.

The motto on the frieze

Non nobis Domine non nobis, cut across the front of one of the most expensive private houses of its century. It is worth finding from a boat: at that distance the lettering is legible and the irony is unavoidable.

A casino in a Codussi palace

The Casino di Venezia has wintered here since 1959, descended from the Ridotto of 1638, generally reckoned the oldest public gambling house in the world. The Renaissance rooms are the gaming rooms.

The garden

A walled garden behind the palace, a genuine rarity on the Grand Canal, where ground was too valuable to leave unbuilt.

The palace stands on the northern bank of the Grand Canal in Cannaregio, by the San Marcuola vaporetto stop -- which the line 1 and 2 announcements sometimes call "Casino" instead.

This is a wide, straight and comparatively empty stretch of the canal, well upstream of the Rialto and outside the congested reaches. There is room to see the facade from a distance and from directly opposite, which a symmetrical composition of this kind needs and which the busier bends do not allow.

The setting is otherwise ordinary Cannaregio: residential calli behind, the Strada Nova a few minutes inland, and none of the concentration of grand palaces found further downstream. Vendramin Calergi is conspicuously the finest thing on its stretch of water.

The Ghetto is a ten-minute walk north-west and the railway station about the same distance west, which makes this one of the first major palaces a visitor arriving by train passes on the vaporetto into the city.