Palazzo Venezia

Stand still for a moment and listen. Behind you, scooters and buses circle Piazza Venezia in a constant, swirling roar. In front of you, a long wall of pale stone rises, quiet and heavy. Its top edge is cut into square battlements, like a castle. The windows sit high above the street. This is Palazzo Venezia, and it looks more like a fortress than a palace. That is not an accident.

The building began in the mid-fifteenth century as the home of a cardinal. His name was Pietro Barbo, and he came from Venice. He was the titular cardinal of the old church of San Marco, which still stands attached to the palace. Saint Mark is the patron saint of Venice, so a Venetian cardinal living beside his church made a neat fit. When Barbo was elected pope in 1464, taking the name Paul the Second, his house grew into something much larger.

Why does a papal residence look so defensive? Rome in the fifteenth century was not a calm city. Powerful noble families fought each other in the streets. Popes had enemies, and crowds could turn quickly. Thick walls, small upper windows and a crenellated roofline sent a clear message. This was a place that could protect itself. Notice the corner tower too. It gives the whole block a watchful, almost military feel.

Yet look a little closer at the windows. Many of them are divided by a stone cross, a vertical bar and a horizontal bar. These are called cross-mullioned windows, and they belong to a new, more elegant style. So the building stands between two worlds. It has the bones of a medieval fortress and the first touches of the Renaissance, the period when Italian builders rediscovered the order and proportion of ancient Rome. Historians still debate exactly who designed it.

Here is a detail many visitors never hear. Much of the stone for the palace is said to have come from the Colosseum, just down the road. For centuries, Romans treated the ancient ruins as a quarry. Travertine blocks were carted away and reused in new churches and palaces. So when you touch these walls, you may be touching stone that once watched gladiators. It is a very Roman kind of recycling.

Paul the Second left another mark on the city, and it runs right past this building. He loved Carnival, the festival of feasting before Lent. He brought the celebrations to the long, straight street that starts here, the Via del Corso. Horse races thundered down it, and the street took its name from them, because corso means a course or a race. Today it is a shopping street, but the name still carries the memory of those races.

After the popes moved on, the palace changed hands in a way that explains its name. In the sixteenth century, a later pope gave it to the Republic of Venice. It became the residence of the Venetian ambassador to the papacy. So for a long time, this was a small piece of Venice in the heart of Rome. That is why the building, the square and the whole area are called Venezia today.

Then history took a sharp turn. At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon ended the Venetian Republic, and Austria took over many Venetian territories. The palace went with them. It served as the Austrian embassy to the Holy See for more than a century. During the First World War, when Italy and Austria were enemies, the Italian state took the building back. Palazzo Venezia was Italian again.

Now look up at the balcony on the main front. It is small, and easy to miss among all that stone. But it is the most famous balcony in modern Italian history. From 1929, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator, used this palace as his headquarters. He spoke to enormous crowds from that balcony. In June 1940, he announced from there that Italy was entering the Second World War. The square below filled with people for these speeches.

Inside, Mussolini worked in a vast room called the Sala del Mappamondo, the Hall of the Globe. It was named after a world map once kept there. The room is huge, and visitors had to walk the full length of it to reach his desk. People often say this was designed to make them feel small. The light in his office was sometimes left on at night, so Romans would think he was always working.

After the war, the building found a gentler purpose. Today it is the National Museum of Palazzo Venezia. Its rooms hold paintings, sculpture, tapestries, ceramics, silver and small bronzes, many from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Inside there is also a quiet garden courtyard with palm trees and an unfinished loggia, an arched gallery that was never completed. After the noise outside, it feels like a different city.

Before you leave, walk around to the corner near the church of San Marco. There you will find a large, battered stone bust of a woman, worn almost faceless. Romans call her Madama Lucrezia. She is one of the talking statues of Rome. For centuries, people stuck anonymous verses on these statues, often mocking popes and powerful figures. Ordinary Romans used them to say what they could not say out loud.

The square in front changed dramatically in the early twentieth century, when the enormous white Vittoriano monument was built across from the palace. To clear space, a smaller building attached to the palace, the Palazzetto Venezia, was taken apart and rebuilt a short distance away. So even this fortress has had to make room for the city around it.

As you turn back toward the traffic, look once more at that long stone face. A Venetian cardinal built it, ambassadors lived in it, an empire claimed it and a dictator spoke from it. Now pigeons sit on the battlements, and tourists pause to check their maps beneath the balcony. The palace has outlasted every one of its owners. Listen to the scooters circling the square, and let the old walls stand quietly behind you as you walk on.