Discover Peggy Guggenheim Collection

A white palace on the Grand Canal that stands one storey high where its neighbours stand four: Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was never finished above the ground floor. The result is a long low front of Istrian stone with a flat terrace along the water, and behind it a walled garden — the only substantial open ground on this stretch of the canal.

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was designed by Lorenzo Boschetti in a restrained Neoclassical style, faced in white Istrian stone in a deliberate departure from the more ornate Gothic and Baroque palazzi lining the rest of the Grand Canal. Construction stopped after the ground floor was completed, reportedly when funding ran out or a rival Corner family palace nearby was judged impossible to overshadow -- either way, the single story that survives was never meant to be the finished building.

That truncation is what gives the palazzo its distinctive low, flat-roofed profile today, since the terrace now doubling as sculpture display space was originally meant to be a base for additional floors above. The building's modest scale, unusual for a Grand Canal palazzo, is precisely what makes its garden and canal-facing terrace function so well as exhibition space.