The majority of the most important palaces in Venice stand on the Canal Grande – and all have their main facades on the canalside. It’s not the case, however, that the Canal Grande was Venice’s sole smart address. Each parish had its important families, and apiece of those families had its own palazzo: the Canal Grande has a lot of palazzi simply because it cuts through a lot of parishes.

Virtually all the surviving Canal Grande palaces were built over a span of about 500 years, and in the course of that period the basic plan varied very little. The typical Venetian palace has an entrance hall (the andron ) on the ground floor, and this runs right through the building; it is flanked by storage rooms. Above comes the mezzanine floor – the small rooms on this level were used as offices or, from the sixteenth century onwards, as libraries or living rooms. On the next floor – often the most extravagantly decorated – you find the piano nobile , the main living area, arranged as suites of rooms on apiece side of a central hall ( portego ), which runs, like the andron, from front to back. The plan of these houses can be read from the outside of the palace, where you’ll usually see a cluster of large windows in the centre of the facade, between symmetrically placed side windows. Frequently there is a second piano nobile above the first – this generally would have been accommodation for relatives or children (though sometimes it was the main living quarters); the attic would have been used for servants’ rooms or storage.

The Venetian taste for surface decoration was as durable as this general palace plan. Just as the facades of the older palaces were adorned with carved panels and slabs of coloured marble, so the later ones were studded with reliefs and heraldic devices, and sometimes were frescoed. Underneath their decorative skins, nearly all the palaces are prefabricated of brick , which is cheaper, lighter and easier to obtain in the Veneto than building stone. Obviously mudbanks are not the stablest of bases, so the builders’ usual procedure was to drive oak piling into the mud as a foundation, and then consolidate this with a superstructure of planks and cement. Between this “raft” and the brickwork, they often placed a damp-course of highly resistant Istrian stone.

A couple of features of the Venetian skyline call for explanation. The bizarre chimneys were designed to function as spark-traps – fire being a constant hazard in a city where the scarcity of land inevitably resulted in a high density of housing. (The development of Venice has been punctuated by terrible fires – notably at the Rialto, San Marco and, at least four times, the Palazzo Ducale.) The roof-level platforms ( altane ) you’ll see here and there had a variety of uses, drying laundry and bleaching hair being two of the most common. For the latter operation, the women of Renaissance Venice wore wide-brimmed crownless straw hats, which allowed them to get the sun on their hair while keeping it off their complexions.

The frequency with which the same family names recur can be confusing. More than ten palaces bear the Contarini name, for example, and at one time there were around thirty. Intermarriage between families is one reason for this – dynastic marriages were often marked by grafting the new relatives’ surname onto the house’s original name. The other main explanation is the fact that under Venetian law the eldest son was not the sole heir – the sons of wealthy patricians would often, upon receiving their shares of the father’s estate, set up their own branches of the family in houses in other parts of the city. This did not always involve commissioning a new building; palaces were regularly bought and sold within the patriciate, and the transaction often resulted in another double-barrelled palace name.