Casa di Carlo Goldoni

The Gothic palace between the Nomboli and Donna Onesta bridges is where Carlo Goldoni was born in 1707. It preserves the playwright's connection to Venice and houses a theatre-studies library.

Why it matters

Goldoni rewrote eighteenth-century comedy, replacing masked improvisation with written characters drawn from the streets of his native city, and the house where that career began is preserved by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia as one of the civic museums. MUVE's own pages quote the playwright's recollection, written at eighty in Paris: "I was born in Venice, in 1707, in a large and beautiful house". The palace joins an authentic late-Republic domestic interior with documentation of the playwright who gave Venetian theatre a literary voice.

What to notice

The facade curves along a narrow canal and is dominated on the noble floor by a quadruple-mullioned window with slender columns and inflected arches, a feature of late-Gothic domestic design. Terracotta floors run through a porticoed hall toward the water gate; the courtyard has an open stairway on pointed arches with an Istrian-stone handrail and cylindrical columns. A hedgehog carved on the well is the arms of the Rizzi family, who owned the palace and rented it to the Zentani, or Centani, family. The museum's displays include an eighteenth-century puppet theatre from the Grimani ai Servi collection.

Context and history

The palace was built in the fifteenth century as a typical Gothic dwelling and, despite later renovations, it retains the layout of Venetian civil architecture from the turn of the fifteenth century. Carlo's paternal grandfather, Carlo Alessandro, a solicitor from Modena, settled here at the end of the seventeenth century; the family stayed until 1719, and Carlo was born on 25 February 1707. His life ran from Venice to Paris, where he died in 1793; the museum's account recalls that, when he wrote his memoirs in that city, he could count twenty-five years there.

The museum owes its existence to a private rescue. In 1914 the scholar Aldo Rava, Count Piero Foscari and Commendatore Antonio Pellegrini bought the palace from Countess Ida Manassero Camozzo to create a museum dedicated to the playwright and to Italian theatre; the war stopped the project, and in 1931 Ca' Centani was bequeathed to the Municipality of Venice so it could be restored. The Goldoni Museum opened in 1953; the building also houses the theatre-studies library.