In the Castello district, a short walk from Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Palazzo Grimani offers a different kind of Venetian museum visit. This was not designed as a public gallery: it was the city residence of a powerful patrician family. Today the rooms preserve traces of that domestic world while presenting the collecting ambition of Giovanni Grimani, a sixteenth-century churchman and connoisseur.
The Grimani branch associated with Santa Maria Formosa occupied a prominent place in Venetian public life from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Antonio Grimani acquired the palace late in the fifteenth century and was elected doge in 1521. The building grew through successive generations, so its appearance records changing tastes rather than a single architect’s finished plan.
