Palazzo Ariani Site Features

Three stories tall, the palace's Gothic facade is asymmetrical: elegant multi-light "polifora" windows sit to one side, paired with large Gothic lancet windows on the other, a fenestration pattern typical of Venetian Gothic palaces built before symmetry became the dominant convention. A courtyard, partly enclosed by the building and partly by a garden wall, holds an external staircase carried on pointed arches leading to the upper floors.

The tracery window on the upper floor is the reason the building is known at all. It is a six-light opening whose stone is cut into interlaced circles and quatrefoils above the arches, and it is among the earliest surviving examples of full tracery on a Venetian house -- worked in the middle of the 14th century, decades before the same idea reached the Doge's Palace loggia and long before it became standard along the Grand Canal.

The facade is deliberately unbalanced. The traceried group sits off to one side, with plain lancets ranged beside it, because the plan behind it put the main hall at one end rather than the centre. Symmetrical palace fronts only became the Venetian norm later, which makes this asymmetry a dating clue rather than a defect.

Behind the building, an open staircase carried on pointed arches climbs the courtyard wall to the upper floors. Almost every Venetian palace once had one; nearly all were removed when internal staircases replaced them, and this is one of the few that stayed.

The stone is unrestored to a degree that is now unusual. Nothing here has been recut for effect, so the tracery reads as a worn 14th-century object rather than a 19th-century idea of one -- which is the difference between this facade and several better-known Gothic ones.

The palace stands at the far western end of Dorsoduro, on the Rio dell'Angelo Raffaele, facing the church of Angelo Raffaele across the campo and joined by the Ponte del Soccorso to Palazzo Zenobio next door.

This is one of the emptiest quarters of central Venice. The campo in front is wide, plain and usually deserted, without a single shop aimed at visitors, and the streets around it belong to the parish rather than to anyone passing through.

The setting is the point. Every other 14th-century Gothic facade of this quality stands on the Grand Canal or a busy campo, seen over crowds and boat traffic; this one can be looked at from across an empty square in silence, which is closer to how it was meant to be seen.

The Zattere and the wide Giudecca Canal are a few minutes south, and San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, the other great parish church of this edge of the city, is a short walk west -- the two make a natural pairing with the palace for anyone this far out.