Discover Palazzo Grimani (Santa Maria Formosa)

The remarkable thing about Palazzo Grimani is that it is not laid out like a Venetian palace at all. Venetian houses are organised around a long central hall running from the water door to the back, with rooms off either side and a small light-well for a courtyard. Giovanni Grimani had a Roman palace built instead: a real cortile with a marble colonnade, rooms arranged around it, and an oval staircase rising through the building.

He could do this because the site is inland, on a calle rather than the Grand Canal, with no water frontage to organise the plan around and enough adjoining ground to buy. The south and west wings he added in the 1560s made the courtyard possible.

The Tribuna is the centre of the whole design. It is a tall, square, coffered chamber lit from above through a lantern, built to hold more than 130 ancient sculptures in purpose-made niches and on shelves rising up the walls -- with the light falling from overhead onto marble, exactly as it does in Rome's Pantheon, which Grimani took as his model.

The earlier decoration is by different hands and shows it: Francesco Salviati and Giovanni da Udine did the classical stuccowork and frescoes around 1539-40, and Federico Zuccari and Camillo Mantovano the second-floor rooms in the 1560s. The building is a sequence of Roman ideas imported into Venice over thirty years by one family.