Ca' Rezzonico

Listen first to the water. Small waves slap against the stone steps of the water gate, and a vaporetto engine rumbles past on the Grand Canal. Above you rises a deep grey and white facade of columns, arches and carved heads. The stone looks heavy, almost too heavy to float on a city of mud and wooden piles. Welcome to Ca' Rezzonico, a palace that took about a century to finish and now holds the memory of eighteenth-century Venice.

The word Ca' is short for casa, which means house. In Venice, the great families did not call their homes palaces. They called them simply the house of the family. So Ca' Rezzonico means the house of the Rezzonico. The odd thing is that the Rezzonico family did not start this building. Another noble family, the Bon, began it in the middle of the seventeenth century, with big ambitions and not enough money.

The Bon family hired Baldassare Longhena, one of the great architects of Baroque Venice. Baroque is the dramatic style of the sixteen-hundreds, full of deep shadows, curves and rich carving. Longhena also designed the church of Santa Maria della Salute, the white domed church near the mouth of this canal. Look at the lower floors of the facade. The heavy rustication, the stone cut to look rough and massive, comes from his plan. Then money ran short, Longhena died, and the building stood unfinished for decades.

Here is where the Rezzonico story begins. The family came from the area near Lake Como and made a fortune in trade and finance. In the seventeenth century, Venice sold places in its nobility to raise money for war, and the Rezzonico bought their way in. In the middle of the eighteenth century, they bought this half-built house. They hired the architect Giorgio Massari to complete it. He finished the upper floor and added the grand ballroom inside.

And then came the family's great moment. In 1758, Carlo Rezzonico was elected pope and took the name Clement the Thirteenth. For a family of new nobles, this was the highest possible honour. The same year, a Rezzonico son married into the old Savorgnan family. The palace became a stage for celebration. But the glory did not last. Within a few generations the family line died out, and the house passed through many hands.

When you go inside, the first great room is the ballroom, and it is meant to overwhelm you. The walls and ceiling are covered with painted architecture. Columns, balconies and cornices seem to rise above you, but almost all of it is flat paint. This technique is called quadratura, painted architecture that tricks the eye. Stand in the centre of the floor and look up. The illusion works best from there, and the room seems far taller than it really is.

In the ballroom, look also for the carved furniture of Andrea Brustolon, a sculptor from the mountains north of Venice. He carved wooden figures in dark ebony and pale boxwood. Some figures hold up vases on their shoulders. They are extraordinary pieces of craft, but they also show the darker side of this world: they depict enslaved African men as decoration. The museum presents them as art, and it is worth looking at them with both admiration and honest questions.

Now for the ceilings. Several rooms carry ceiling paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo, the most famous Venetian painter of his century. One celebrates the 1758 marriage. The bride and groom appear among clouds, horses and pale blue sky. Tiepolo's colours are light, almost airy, full of soft pinks, golds and blues. Here is a detail many visitors miss: you may need to tilt your head right back, so take a moment, find a quiet corner, and simply look up.

One of the biggest surprises is upstairs. Giambattista had a son, Giandomenico, also a painter. He painted frescoes on the walls of the family's country villa on the mainland. In the twentieth century, these frescoes were carefully detached from the villa walls and brought here. They are more personal and stranger than his father's ceilings. You will see clowns called Pulcinella, the masked comic figure of Italian theatre, in white costumes. You will also see a crowd with their backs to you, waiting to look into a peep show.

The museum also holds the small paintings of Pietro Longhi, who showed daily life in Venice. Ladies take chocolate in the morning. A rhinoceros appears at the carnival, and people stare. Look for the pastel portraits by Rosalba Carriera, a woman artist famous across Europe in her time. And here is another surprise: the museum has paintings by Canaletto, the master of Venetian views. Very few of his works remain in Venice itself, because foreign collectors carried most of them away.

The nineteenth century brought new residents. The son of the English poet Robert Browning bought the palace. The poet came to stay with him, and Robert Browning died here in 1889. A plaque on the outside wall remembers him. Later, in the 1920s, the American songwriter Cole Porter rented the palace and held famous parties. Then, in the 1930s, the City of Venice bought the building and turned it into a museum of eighteenth-century Venetian life.

On the top floor, look for a reconstructed old pharmacy, with jars, wooden shelves and a back room for mixing medicines. It is one of the quieter corners of the house. Then find a window that faces the Grand Canal. From these windows you see the curve of the water, the boats and the palaces on the far side. The view helps you imagine how the Rezzonico family saw their city, from high above the traffic of the canal.

When you leave, step back onto the street or onto the landing stage outside. Turn and look once more at the facade. Notice how the lower floors feel heavy and serious, and the top floor feels a little lighter. That change is the story of two architects and two families. Listen again to the water against the steps. It is the same sound the guests heard when they arrived here by gondola, more than two hundred and fifty years ago.