Ca' d'Oro

Built between 1421 and 1440 for Marino Contarini, a procurator of San Marco, the Ca' d'Oro was the most expensive private commission of its day. The Contarini were one of the founding dynasties of the Republic — they would eventually give Venice eight doges — and Marino spared nothing for the family seat: his contracts survive, and they show payments to two architects, the father-and-son team Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon, who would later carve the Porta della Carta of the Doge's Palace.

Its façade was painted by the French master Jean Charlier in ultramarine, vermillion and pure gold leaf — applied directly onto the marble tracery, hence the building's nickname, the Casa d'Oro, "house of gold". It was the doge's house in miniature, and meant to be read as such from the water. The original gilding washed off within a generation; the surviving fretwork still hints at how dazzling the canal-front must once have been.

The 19th century treated it badly. After centuries of patrician hands, the palazzo passed in 1846 to the Russian Prince Alexander Trubetzkoy, who bought it as a gift for the ballerina Maria Taglioni. She stripped its grand external staircase out, sold its wellhead and turned the open loggia into a closed apartment. The baron Giorgio Franchetti rescued it in 1894, spent thirty years undoing the damage, restored the open façade, and bequeathed the building and his art collection to the Italian state in 1916.

Today the rooms carry a small but extraordinary collection — Mantegna's San Sebastiano, bronzes by Riccio, Flemish tapestries, and a courtyard wellhead carved like a piece of jewellery.

The view from the upper loggia, square onto the Pescaria fish market across the canal, is one of the few unchanged sightlines in Venice.