Palazzo Ariani Site Features

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.