Palazzo Falier Site Features

The bricked-up windows

Both upper floors were built with pentafore -- five-light openings -- and on each the leftmost arch has been filled in, leaving four. The blocked arches are still legible in the stonework, so the facade carries the evidence of its own alteration rather than hiding it.

The paterae

Carved stone roundels and Gothic shields were added across the front in the 13th and 15th centuries, three or four hundred years after the wall behind them. They sit slightly awkwardly on the Byzantine arcade, which is exactly what makes the building useful: it is a single facade with three separate periods still visible at once.

The doge with no portrait

Marin Falier was elected in September 1354 and executed in April 1355, the only doge put to death by the Republic. In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio at the Doge's Palace his portrait is replaced by a painted black cloth carrying an inscription recording his crime -- a deliberate erasure kept on permanent display, and the reason this modest side-canal palace is remembered at all.