Ca' Rezzonico, Palazzo Cini and the Vedova Foundation in Venice

In a nutshell: the palazzo side of Dorsoduro - Ca' Rezzonico's Museum of 18th-Century Venice, Palazzo Cini's private collection and the Vedova Foundation's raw canvases. Continue with the churches, the Zattere and the waterfront, or start from the district overview.

Ca' Rezzonico

In the 1700s Venice was the playground of Europe's aristocrats, including the wealthy Rezzonico family, who owned this palace on the Grand Canal's west bank. Today the Ca' Rezzonico - the Museo del Settecento Veneziano, the Museum of 18th-Century Venice - holds furniture, decoration and artwork from the era, and is the finest place in town to absorb the luxurious, decadent spirit of the Settecento. It's at the Ca' Rezzonico vaporetto stop, a 10-minute walk from the Accademia Bridge and 20 minutes from the Rialto. Tickets cost €10 (a €1 fee applies for online reservations, covered by the Museum Pass); hours are Wednesday to Monday 10.00–18.00, November to March until 17.00, closed Tuesday year-round, with the ticket office shutting an hour before the museum; the audioguide costs €4; baggage check is free and required for large items. Contact: +39 041 241 0100, http://carezzonico.visitmuve.it. Arriving by vaporetto, admire the massive stone facade on the Grand Canal - the dock was, naturally, the main entrance back in the 1700s. In the palace courtyard, admire the 1700s-era gondola on display: imagine it pulling up to the Ca's landing for a Carnevale party, a charcoal brazier inside keeping the masked, caped passengers warm as they sipped prosecco and chatted in French, enjoying their winter holiday far from home. Buy your tickets on the ground floor, then climb the grand staircase to the first floor, where the one-way route through the numbered rooms begins. Room 2, the ballroom, would make a spectacular wedding venue: at 5,600 square feet it could be the largest private space in the city, and the ceiling painting opens onto the heavens, with trompe l'oeil columns and arches giving onto false alcoves - picture guests dancing beneath candlelit chandeliers to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, gentlemen in powdered wigs, linen shirts with lace cuffs and snug velvet coats, carrying snuffboxes with naughty pictures inside the lids, ladies with powdered hair threaded with portraits of their children or locks of a lover's hair, and everyone bearing a mask on a stick to change identity in an instant. The gold-leafed wooden chandeliers are original, though most of the furniture, while authentically 1700s, comes from outside the Rezzonico family collection. In Room 3, the Nuptial Allegory Salon, a blissful couple arrives on the ceiling in a chariot drawn by four white horses, serenaded by angels, cupids and Virtues: it was here, in 1758, that Ludovico Rezzonico wed Faustina Savorgnan, beneath the horses' bellies painted for the occasion by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), the most sought-after decorator of Europe's palaces - at the height of his fame and skill he produced it in 12 days, and his vivid colors and unbridled imagination made his frescoes melt into the ornate Baroque and Rococo furniture. The Portrait of Clement XIII, pink-cheeked and well-fed, shows the most famous Rezzonico, elected pope in 1758, reigning over the family's greatest age: the Rezzonico were nouveaux riches who bought their way into the exclusive club of Venetian patrician families - the state, strapped for cash to fund its military ventures, literally sold noble status - then pursued a strategy of acceptance by the old aristocracy, purchasing and decorating this palace, marrying into high society, landing prestigious offices and even placing one of their own on the papal throne. In the tiny adjoining chapel, a heavily used prayer kneeler survives from the sin-and-repent era of Settecento Venice. Room 4, the Pastel Room, holds portraits by Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), Europe's most celebrated pastel portraitist: wealthy French and English tourists wanted a souvenir of Venice, and Carriera obliged with miniature portraits on ivory rather than the traditional vellum - the Instagram shots of the 18th century - and her Portrait of Sister Maria Caterina shows a warts-and-all realism that hides nothing of the nun's heavy brows, long nose and forehead vein, only deepening the spirituality she radiates; at 47 she was summoned to Paris, where she became the toast of the town. Room 5, the Tapestry Room, conveys the Rococo luxury of 1700s Venice - tapestries, gilded wood furniture from a Venetian workshop, and a door with Asian motifs showing an opium smoker on his own little island paradise - yet beneath the mask of gaiety, 1700s Venice was a poor, politically bankrupt, dirty city where garbage floated in the canals, and its reputation for decay and sleaze was romanticized into a metaphor for adventures in shady morality, with licensed casinos and thousands of courtesans. Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) - born just across the Grand Canal from the Ca' Rezzonico, the son of an actor, trained for the priesthood but expelled for seducing nuns - epitomized it all: he first made his name among Venetians as a fiery violinist at glittering parties in palaces such as this, and would later do time in the Doge's Palace prison, accused of sorcery. Room 6, the Throne Room, overlooks the Grand Canal, where the Forze d'Ercole acrobats stood in boats and kept building a human pyramid of up to 50 bodies until it toppled, laughing, into the water; the ceiling fresco, again by G. B. Tiepolo, opens the room's skylight, letting angels descend to collect the Rezzonico patriarch - the old, bald, bearded man crowned with laurels, rising on a cloud toward the translucent temple of glory, while the angels carry Venice's Golden Book, the roll of nobles the family bought into in 1687; the leg of the lady in white seems to dangle over the "rim" of the painted oval, and if you walk in circles beneath the fresco you can watch the trumpeting angel spin. Room 7 was the games room, with a card table at the center and, along the wall, the great walnut cabinet that is one of the few original Rezzonico pieces; the ceiling painting of Nobility and Virtue defeating Treachery is on canvas, not fresco like the others, moved here from another palazzo, and the sober, down-to-earth portraits around the room are by Tiepolo and his sons, Lorenzo and Giovanni Domenico. Room 8 is the library where the English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889) spent his later years, reading in a melancholy mood and brooding on his own lines: "Oh to be in England, now that April's there…". Room 9 holds the big, colorful paintings of Gregorio Lazzarini (1655–1730), Tiepolo's teacher; Room 10 overflows with the Baroque fantasies of Andrea Brustolon (1662–1732) - tables, chairs and vase stands carved in black ebony, reddish boxwood and brown walnut, including a vase stand supporting a white vase with ebony slaves in chains carved from a single piece of wood (a racist motif, but an impressive feat of carving) - and the room's flowery Murano glass chandelier in pastel pinks, blues and turquoise is original. In Room 11, the portego, that funny little cabin in the room is a sedan chair, a servant-powered taxi for Venice's nobles: four strong-shouldered men ran poles through the iron brackets on either side and carried it on their shoulders, while the rich rode in red-velvet luxury above the grimy streets.

The first floor displayed the rooms and furniture of the 1700s; the second-floor paintings show the people who occupied those chairs. Room 12, the painting portego, features two works by Canaletto (1697–1768), Venice's great painter of urban views, who began as a young theater-set painter working on Scarlatti operas in Rome before realizing his true calling was depicting reality: The View of Rio dei Mendicante records every chimney, every open shutter, every pair of underwear hung out to dry, while The Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi to Rialto captures the prospect from the palazzo two doors down, with photographic clarity, drawing the eye to the tiny, half-hidden Rialto Bridge on the far horizon - note the shadows on both banks of the canal, physically impossible but more picturesque, since Canaletto, who studied the mathematics of perspective meticulously, was not above bending the rules to squeeze more of Venice into the frame; in his later years he fell back on painting from engravings or following formulas, but these two early works reflect his pure ambition to paint faithfully the city he loved. Room 16 holds the genre scenes of Pietro Longhi (1701–1785), the best window onto 1700s Venice: ladies and gentlemen at the hairdresser or the dentist, dressed in the finery expected in every public setting - small easel works offering a psychoanalytic view of society, pervaded by an overwhelming sense of boredom: no dynamism, not even any windows, a society closed off from the world, lacking initiative and with no shortage of leisure. Room 19 is the alcove Casanova dreamed of - a fancy boudoir with a large bed topped by a Madonna by Rosalba Carriera, a walnut dresser, Neoclassical wallpaper and silver toiletries. Room 13 displays the frescoes Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo painted at the family villa at Zianigo for his own amusement, far earthier than his father's lofty fantasies: New World shows ordinary folk crowding around a building with a peep-show window (the only faces we see are G. D. Tiepolo himself, far right with eyeglass, his father G. B. with folded arms, and baby brother Lorenzo at center), and the Pulcinella Room presents the hook-nosed, white-clad, hunchbacked clown of Carnevale - here weary, lecherous and stupid - for the decadent gaiety of Settecento Venice ran headlong into the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité erupting in France: Venetians bought their own propaganda, stopped trading, stopped traveling, and withdrew into their palaces, choosing to dance rather than adapt, carousing as if drunk on the wealth amassed through centuries of trade. Room 14 holds a harpsichord, whose strings are plucked rather than hammered like a piano's - always the same volume; when hammers were introduced shortly after, the novelty of playing both soft and loud led Italians to name the instrument the pianoforte, the soft-loud. Room 15, the parlor, features Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), who, like Canaletto, supplied foreigners with views of Venice but with looser brushwork that throws a romantic haze over the decaying city: Il Parlatorio delle Monache di S. Zaccaria shows visiting day at a convent school, the girls cloistered with their servant girls behind grilles, chatting and taking tea with family, friends and prospective suitors (note the puppet show starring wife-beating Pulcinella), and Il Ridotto di Palazzo Dandolo shows masked partygoers at a Venetian palace licensed for gambling - the men wear the traditional bautta, a three-piece getup of face mask, three-cornered hat and cowl, actually required by law in certain disreputable establishments so that every sinner was equally anonymous, while the women wear Lone Ranger masks and flaunt a hint of cleavage to potential customers. The final, most skippable part of the museum is the top floor, holding a large collection of Venetian paintings amassed by a local scholar named Egidio Martini, mostly by lesser-known artists of the 1600s and 1700s, with one room of 19th- and early-20th-century works including a few Impressionists. Allow an hour for the visit (more if you want to explore the third floor on your own); with less than an hour, concentrate on Rooms 1–7 on the first floor, with their Tiepolo ceilings and atmosphere. The city-run MUVE museums - Ca' Rezzonico included - offer discounts for youth/students (6–25) and seniors (65+). The museum's café serves simple fare - panini and pasta, no museum entry required - with tables on the Grand Canal, and the delightful Campo San Barnaba, with its eateries, is just a three-minute walk away.

The palace went up in 1649 for the procurator Filippo Bon, a senior figure in city government, but its golden age began in 1750, when the Rezzonico family bought the building and, with it, their noble titles. Upstairs, the Throne Room ceiling by Giambattista Tiepolo is a tour de force of upward mobility - Merit, a bearded elder, ascends toward a Temple of Glory while a cherub carries the Golden Book, the roll of Venice's noble families, including the Rezzonicos themselves. Pietro Longhi's winsome social satires on the second floor include Il Rinoceronte, which turned the touring rhinoceros Miss Clara into hoofed celebrity and set off a craze for horn-shaped hairdos; on the third floor, a beautiful, time-warped 18th-century pharmacy survives, relocated from the old Campo San Stin site. Reduced tickets run €7.50, and the canalside Rezzonico Caffè pours million-euro panoramas at everyday prices (10am-6pm Wed-Mon).

Palazzo Cini and the Vedova foundation

If the Accademia crowds wear you down, Palazzo Cini (€10, reduced €8; open April to October) offers a Zen-like alternative. This Grand Canal palace was the residence of Vittorio Cini, a fabulously rich industrialist who collected art, and its beautifully furnished salons mix rare wallpapers and period furniture with a compact, choice collection of 13th- to 16th-century paintings, sculptures and objets d'art, with a lean towards the Renaissance schools of Tuscany and Ferrara. Upstairs, retrospectives have spotlighted solo figures such as Martha Jungwirth, Joseph Beuys and Artemisia Gentileschi. Along the Zattere, the Fondazione Vedova (€8, reduced €6) honours Emilio Vedova, the iconoclastic Venetian abstract painter (1919-2006), across two adjoining spaces: the Magazzini del Sale, the salt warehouses of the 14th century, and Spazio Vedova, a former boathouse he turned into his atelier. The warehouses were retrofitted by Renzo Piano, the Pritzker-winning architect and a friend of Vedova's, to show off his vast canvases of raw expressionism, with violent slabs of yellow, blue, black and scarlet. Shows are mostly a summer affair - see the site for the current programme.