Palazzo Dolfin Manin Site Features

The arcade the Republic imposed

The ground-floor walkway is the palace's oddest feature and was not Dolfin's idea. The Republic's magistrates required him to carry the public fondamenta straight through the base of his new house, and he objected and lost -- so the Riva del Carbon passes underneath the building rather than around it. It remains one of very few Grand Canal palaces a visitor can walk through the ground floor of without entering it.

Sansovino's first Venetian palace

The facade of 1538-47 applies a Roman order to a Venetian house: Ionic half-columns on the piano nobile, Corinthian above, and white Istrian stone throughout. Several historians treat it as Sansovino's earliest palace commission in the city, which makes it the point where Venetian domestic building starts to look Roman rather than Byzantine.

The last doge's rooms

Ludovico Manin bought the palace with his brother in 1787, ten years before he presided over the Republic's vote to dissolve itself. He returned here afterwards and died in these rooms in 1802, out of public life -- so the building is both the address of a doge and the address where the office ended.

What is no longer here

The Tiepolo paintings the Manin commissioned are gone, as is the family library, once among the most important in Venice and dispersed in the 19th century. Ceilings and stuccowork by Guarana, Cedini and Bison survive from the Selva remodelling, behind a facade that gives no sign either way.