The western sestiere: Ca' Pesaro's modern art, the Palazzo Mocenigo costume museum, and the city's last silk weavers and paper marblers.
Last updated August 14, 2026
In a nutshell: Santa Croce holds Ca' Pesaro's modern art, the Palazzo Mocenigo costume museum, the quirky natural-history museum - and the workshops of the city's last craftsmen. Back to the overview.
Once you have crossed the Rialto Bridge you can also roam the entire market as far as Campo delle Beccarie, continue along Calle dei Botteri to Campo San Cassiano and, turning at the first little alley on the right, reach the atmospheric Campo Santa Maria Materdomini, framed by handsome late-Byzantine buildings. Bearing right from there brings you to Ca' Pesaro, a 17th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal housing the International Gallery of Modern Art: founded in 1897 with works drawn from the first Biennales, it holds one of the largest collections of Italian and foreign painting, sculpture and graphic art from the late 19th century to the present. While the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is unquestionably Venice's finest modern gallery, Ca' Pesaro is a clear second - and it owns a few instantly recognisable masterpieces, above all Klimt's beautiful/creepy Judith II, with her eagle-talon fingers, Kandinsky's White Zig Zags and Chagall's Rabbi #2. The collection is at its strongest with Italian, especially Venetian, artists: after buying tickets, go upstairs and begin with 19th-century sculpture (Rodin and Medardo Rosso, Room 1), then Romanticism (Room 2), Impressionism and fin-de-siècle art (Rooms 3–4), more sculpture (including the Milanese Adolfo Wildt) plus Chagall's unexpectedly realistic portrait of his hometown rabbi (Room 5), Venetian Impressionism (Room 6), the Modernist art of the 1920s–30s - including Bonnard's vivid Nude in the Mirror, which compresses the 3-D scene into a 2-D grid of rectangles (Rooms 7–9), the 1930s–40s (Room 10), big international names like Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, Calder and Ernst (Room 11), abstract art (Rooms 12–14), and Dada and Pop Art (Room 15). Tucked away on the top floor is the Museum of Oriental Art, easy to skip. Ca' Pesaro costs €14 (covered by the Museum Pass), open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, Nov–March until 17:00, closed Mon all year, last entry one hour before closing; it is a 2-minute walk from the San Stae vaporetto stop (+39 041 721 127, capesaro.visitmuve.it).
A block in from San Stae is the Palazzo Mocenigo Costume Museum (Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo), a pleasant ramble through a dozen rooms of a fine 17th-century mansion: alongside period clothing and accessories, you can sample an array of perfumes and spices and watch a film on the history of perfume in Venice. The rooms evoke aristocratic life in Venice's golden age, with furniture, family portraits, ceilings painted (c. 1790) with family triumphs - the Mocenigos gave Venice seven doges - and Murano glass chandeliers still in place; English cards in each room offer brief descriptions. €8, covered by the Museum Pass, Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, Nov–March until 17:00, closed Mon all year; +39 041 721 798, mocenigo.visitmuve.it.
The Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia fills the Fondaco dei Turchi, a 13th-century Pesaro family palazzo that gave lodging to merchants from Turkey, Persia, Bosnia and Albania from 1621 to 1838. Its cabinets are the city's quirkiest: fossils from palaeontologist Giancarlo Ligabue's expeditions in Niger, including a Sarcosuchus imperator skeleton of terrifying size, the traveller Giovanni Mani's hoard from his 19th-century trips down the Nile - jewellery, footwear, weapons, mummies - and a Wunderkammer holding calves with two heads and a tzantza - a shrunken head. Fondazione Prada runs cutting-edge shows from May through November in a 1728 palazzo by Domenico Rossi, whose principal floor is frescoed with the story of Caterina Cornaro - born in this very palazzo in 1454 - who became queen of Cyprus. Palazzetto Bru Zane is the restored 17th-century Casino Zane, whose 100-seat music room now hosts world-class performances of French Romantic repertoire, with free guided tours on Thursdays. The Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice's oldest confraternity, founded in 1261 by flagellants and closed down by Napoleon's decree of 1806, dazzles with Mauro Codussi's optical-illusion staircase of 1498, Giorgio Massari's 1762 Sala Capitolare with a geometric floor of black, white and red marble, and a reliquary of rock crystal set with silver, said to guard True Cross relics. And Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua, the lagoon's last silk weaver since 1875, still crashes away on 18th-century jacquard looms, producing precious velvets - 40cm of fabric is a day's work, priced up to €6000 a metre; guided tours run at €15 on weekdays, €20 on Saturdays.
San Polo has a special weakness for paper. Paolo Pelosin works his magic as a master of the paper-marbling craft known as ebru at Il Pavone, on the little square called Campiello dei Meloni, decorating stationery, journals, albums and even pencils in the Turkish technique Venice adopted centuries ago. The bijou Damocle Edizioni is both bookshop and publisher, its books sewn by hand, their pages decorated with painted watercolours, woodcut prints and mosaic tesserae. La Colombina turns antique prints into affordable collage jewellery - tarot de Marseille earrings, kimono-themed pieces - while Paperoowl builds pendant earrings and lace-like collars from Japanese washi paper, folded origami-style. Elsewhere, Process Collettivo makes fun PVC totes and wallets from upcycled billboards, Fanny Gloves hand-stitches soft leather gloves, Ambrus Antichità rummages through antiques, and Rialto 79 sells real Venetian glass jewellery at fair prices by the bridge. Bookworms have Polo Urban Bookshop near the market, a big Feltrinelli with hundreds of foreign-language titles, the erudite Libreria Einaudi Venezia and nautical-minded Libreria Mare di Carta.
Two walks cover the district's hidden corners. San Polo's backstreets (1.5km, about 2½ hours) begin right on the Rialto Bridge's steps: just past the souvenir stalls of Ruga dei Oresi, the Fabbriche Vecchie's Renaissance porticoes, still bearing frescoes, rise behind; hop over the Rio de le Becarie and slip under Sotoportego Carampane, the old red-light quarter, where the district's older working women were pensioned off at Ca' Rampani; from there go over Ponte delle Tette, past Palazzo Bonvicini, home of the Valmont Foundation's contemporary shows in rococo rooms, and finish past Campo San Boldo. The low-profile Santa Croce loop (950m, about 1½ hours) leaves from Ponte degli Scalzi: follow Calle Longa past San Simeon Grande, a church from 967 with an 18th-century facade, to Riva de Biasio - recalling a butcher of the 1500s who was put to death for stewing children's body parts - then the Venetian-Byzantine San Zan Degolà, whose southern facade carries a bas-relief reputed to show the butcher's face, before the Museo di Storia Naturale and Campo San Giacomo da l'Orio.