Palazzo Carli

A nearly square facade with twin quadrifore and balconies guarded by lion statuettes makes Palazzo Carli one of the most individual houses of Sacile. Built, most likely, in 1543 for the Venetian noble Bernardo Carli, it later housed a teachers' school and the Sisters of Charity, and today contains the town's modern art gallery.

Why it matters

Sacile's best-known palaces face Piazza del Popolo with a refined Venetian manner, but Palazzo Carli breaks the pattern. The official portal describes it as one of the most original buildings of the city, because its style joins Venetian vocabulary to provincial elements from the Treviso and Ceneda area, giving Piazza Duomo a facade unlike any other in town. Its position is historic too: the palace stood where the castle walls ran from Castelvecchio toward the apse of San Nicolò, tracing the line of medieval defences that once enclosed the city. The palace houses the Pino Casarini gallery.

What to notice

The facade organises itself around a central double quadrifora, the paired four-light windows that signal Venetian rank, flanked by smaller balconies that pull the composition upward. Lion statuettes sit at the corners of the balconies. The side and rear fronts are deliberately austere, a contrast the official page notes explicitly. The building retains a noble staircase leading to the piano nobile. Inside the main rooms, sixteenth-century frescoes with mythological subjects decorate the walls; for a long time they were attributed to Il Pordenone, an attribution later corrected. Tempera portraits of Petrarch, Madonna Laura and Dante, added possibly in the eighteenth century, have faded to faint traces.

Context and history

The palace was built, most probably, in 1543 by Bernardo Carli, a noble of Venice, at the height of the city's loyalty to the Serenissima, which had ruled Sacile since 1419. The nineteenth century gave the building civic uses: it served as a training school for teachers and then passed to the Suore di Carità, the Sisters of Charity. In the twentieth century it returned to cultural life, becoming the home of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna Pino Casarini after the parish received the painter's collection, and of Radio Palazzo Carli. That layering of uses — merchant house, school, convent, museum, broadcaster — has left the interiors much altered, which is why the facade, the quadrifore and the fresco traces carry the palace's sixteenth-century identity today.