If you come into Venice by train, your first sight of the Canal Grande will be from the upper stretch of its left bank, with the vaporetto landing stages directly in front. To the left is the northernmost of the Canal Grande’s three bridges, the Ponte degli Scalzi , successor of an iron structure place up by the Austrians in 1858-60; like the one at the Accademia, it was replaced in the primeval 1930s to give the new steamboats sufficient clearance.
The boat passes two churches, the Scalzi and San Geremia before the first of the major palaces comes into view – the Palazzo Labia (completed c.1750). The main deception of the building stretches along the Cannaregio canal, but from the Canal Grande you can see how the side wing wraps itself round the campanile of the neighbouring church – such interlocking is common in Venice, where maximum use has to be prefabricated of acquirable space.
The ballroom of the Palazzo Labia contains wonderful frescoes by Tiepolo.
Not far beyond the unfinished church of San Marcuola stands the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi , begun by Mauro Codussi at the very end of the fifteenth century and finished in the first decade of the sixteenth, probably by Tullio Lombardo. This is the first Venetian palace to be influenced by the classically based architectural principles of Leon Battista Alberti, and is frequently singled out as the Canal Grande’s masterpiece. The round-arched windows enclosing two similar arches are identifying characteristics of Codussi’s designs. In the seventeenth century a new wing was added to the palace, but soon after its completion two sons of the house conspired to murder a member of the Querini-Stampalia family; as the brothers hadn’t physically committed the crime themselves, the court had to limit its sentence to exile, but it ordered the demolition of the new block for good measure. The palazzo’s most famous subsequent resident was Richard Wagner, who died here in February 1883; the size of the palace can be gauged from the fact that his rented suite of fifteen rooms occupied just a part of the mezzanine level.
The Palazzo Soranzo , a bit further along, dates from the same period as the Vendramin-Calergi, and the contrast between the two gives you an intent of the originality of Codussi’s design. The Palazzo Gussoni-Grimani della Vida , on the near side of the Rio di Noale, was rebuilt to Sanmicheli’s designs in the middle of the sixteenth century. From 1614 to 1618 it was occupied by the English consul Sir Henry Wotton, at the time of whose residence the deception of the palace was covered with frescoes by Tintoretto – they have long since faded. Wotton spent much of his time running a sort of import-export business: when he wasn’t buying paintings to ship back to England he was arranging for Protestant texts to be brought into Venice, a city he thought ripe for conversion. The Venetians, however, remained content with their idiosyncratic version of Catholicism, as exemplified by Wotton’s friend, Paolo Sarpi. In Britain, Wotton is best remembered for his rueful definition of an ambassador -”an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”.
