Palazzo Fontana Rezzonico Site Features

The birthplace of a pope

Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico was born here in 1693, while his newly ennobled family were renting the palace and their own far larger one was still being built. He became Clement XIII in 1758 -- one of only a handful of Venetians ever elected pope, and the reason a comparatively modest Cannaregio palace carries the Rezzonico name at all.

The two water gates

The facade has two portals onto the canal rather than the usual one: the main gate centred beneath the piano nobile window, and a smaller second at the far right. The asymmetry is functional -- the palace occupies a corner site at the mouth of the Rio di San Felice, so it needed access from both the Grand Canal and the side canal.

The terracotta obelisks

Two small obelisks stand on the roofline, made almost entirely of terracotta rather than stone. Roof obelisks on a Venetian palace conventionally signalled the home of an admiral or a sea captain; here they are a later Baroque addition to a Renaissance building, and part of why the facade reads as layered rather than of one date.