Discover Palazzo Mocenigo

The palace is Gothic underneath and 17th-century on the surface. The early-1600s rebuilding left the medieval structure largely in place and refaced the openings with Serlian windows -- a round-arched centre light flanked by two square-headed ones -- which is the clearest single marker of Venetian building of that moment.

The plan is the standard Venetian one, and here it can actually be read, because the rooms are furnished rather than emptied. The pòrtego runs the full depth of the building from front to back, taking light from both ends and serving as the reception hall; the private rooms open off it to either side. Almost every palace in the city is arranged this way, and almost none of them still show it.

The first-floor ceilings were painted in 1787 for a family wedding by Jacopo Guarana, Giambattista Canal and Giovanni Scajaro, and they are still in the rooms they were made for. The rooms themselves run Rococo into Neoclassical, which dates them precisely to the last decade of the Republic.

The 2013 renovation doubled the museum to twenty rooms and added six more for the perfume collection, all of it inserted into the existing plan rather than by opening the building up -- so the sequence of spaces a visitor walks is still the sequence the Mocenigo family used.