Palazzo Ducale

Venice governed a maritime empire from a single building. The Doge's Palace fused residence, courtrooms, council chambers and jail behind a pink-and-white Gothic facade, and today it walks you through the machinery of the Republic — from the doge's apartments down past the council halls to the cells by the canal.

Why it matters

The palace's own historians trace it to the ninth century, when the doge's seat already stood here; the oldest surviving wing, facing the St Mark's Basin, was rebuilt from 1340, the wing towards the square followed from 1424, and after a 1483 fire the doge's apartments rose again in Renaissance dress. Two more fires in 1574 and 1577 tested the structure, and the repainting that followed left the state rooms covered with the Republic's self-portrait in paint. After 1797 the building slid into offices and storage — the Biblioteca Marciana occupied it from 1811 to 1904 — before opening as a public museum in 1923, and it now anchors the Fondazione Musei Civici network.

What to notice

The Porta del Frumento on the Piazzetta leads to the Golden Staircase, the ducal route to the piano nobile. The Great Council Hall measures 53 by 25 metres — the palace's guides call it one of the largest rooms in Europe — and behind the doge's throne stretches the Paradise that Jacopo Tintoretto and his workshop, completed with his son Domenico, executed between 1588 and 1592; beneath the ceiling run the portraits of the first seventy-six doges. The adjacent Guariento Room preserves what survived of the Coronation of the Virgin fresco of 1365–1368, damaged in the 1577 fire, together with a sketch for Tintoretto's canvas. Downstairs, the Museo dell'Opera shows the weathered original capitals rescued from the facade columns, while the courtyard's Giants' Staircase carries Sansovino's Mars and Neptune. Finish, as the state's enemies did, in the Armoury and the prisons.

Context and history

The palace was built as the theatre of a constitution. The Great Council, up to two thousand patricians, met under a ceiling of Virtues and allegories of the Republic painted after the 1577 fire by Veronese, the two Tintorettos and Palma il Giovane; the Senate, the Collegio, the Council of Ten and the three Quarantie sat in rooms whose decoration, as the museum notes, celebrates the virtues of the State. Justice was administered here too — the chamber named for the Magistrato alle Leggi adjoins the corridor that once led convicts towards the prisons. The complex kept growing into the seventeenth century, when the New Prisons rose across the canal and the enclosed Bridge of Sighs tied the courts to the cells. Municipally managed since 1923 and part of the civic museums federation since 1996, the palace now hosts special itineraries that open rooms of the secret bureaucracy.