Punta della Dogana Site Features

Giuseppe Benoni's 1682 rebuilding gave the customs house its long, triangular footprint, following the point of land where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca Canal.

At the building's tip, a small tower carries Venice's own weathervane landmark: two bronze figures of Atlas supporting a golden globe, topped by a rotating figure representing Fortune. Tadao Ando's 2009 renovation kept the exterior largely intact while inserting minimalist concrete gallery walls within the original brick and timber structure.

Fortune on the globe

The weathervane group of 1677-78, by Bernardo Falcone, is the building's signature: two crouching bronze Atlases supporting a gilded sphere, with a figure of Fortune above holding a sail-like sheet that turns her with the wind. Reading her direction from the water told approaching crews what the wind was doing at the mouth of the Grand Canal.

Ando's intervention

The 2009 conversion is deliberately legible as an insertion rather than a restoration. Ando left the 17th-century brick walls and roof trusses exposed and set free-standing polished concrete planes inside them, so the old shell and the new galleries never quite touch -- an approach that leaves the customs house readable as a customs house.

The point itself

The paved apron around the building is public and open at all hours, with no ticket. It is one of the few places in Venice where the Grand Canal, the Giudecca Canal, the Bacino di San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore are all visible at once.

The Dogana occupies the last few dozen metres of Dorsoduro, a wedge narrowing to a point with water on both long sides -- the Grand Canal to the north, the Giudecca Canal to the south, and the Bacino di San Marco opening ahead of it.

The site was chosen for control rather than for the view. Everything entering Venice by sea had to pass this point, so a customs house here could intercept traffic before it dispersed into the city's canals.

The consequence is that the building is seen almost entirely from the water and in the round, and it closes the composition that Santa Maria della Salute begins a hundred metres behind it -- dome first, then the long low customs shed, then the tower and the globe as a full stop at the tip.

Behind it the Zattere promenade runs west along the Giudecca Canal, and the walk around the point from the Accademia stays on the waterfront the whole way.