Palazzo Soranzo Site Features

The eight-light window

The 15th-century wing's piano nobile carries a single window of eight lights in a carved marble frame -- an unusually wide opening even for a Gothic palace, and the feature that lets the newer half be told from the older at a glance.

Fauns in the window frames

The older wing's quadruple windows are framed in carved marble with reliefs of fauns and other mythological figures. Classical subjects on a mid-14th-century Venetian house are early, and they repay looking at from directly below rather than across the campo.

Two portals, no symmetry

The older wing has two round-topped doorways placed without regard for each other, a survival from before Venetian Gothic settled into its conventions. The newer wing has one, beside a small lunette. Nothing about the front lines up, and it was never meant to.

The doorbell plate

The bell plate carries an engraved ducal horn -- the corno ducale worn by the doges -- a quiet reference by the family's descendants to Giovanni Soranzo, doge from 1312 to 1328. It is the smallest thing on the building and the only part still making a claim.