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The Directory › Europe › Italy › Venice
Plate II · iv · b · The City

Venice

Two houses ten minutes apart, both empty, in a city where nothing else is.

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A narrow Venetian canal at dusk in November, brick and stone walls meeting still dark water
Plate II · iv · b · Castello, November dusk

Everyone is standing in one square. Ten minutes north of it, two of the best rooms in Europe are unattended.

A day, properly arranged
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Not a Monday. Not carnival week, on any account.

The entries

Two entries, both visited, both without a queue.
An empty Venetian palazzo hall with a painted ceiling, pale terrazzo floor and tall shuttered windows
Interior · Grimani, the upper rooms

Strip a Venetian palace of its furniture and what is left is the argument the architect was actually making.

FEBRUARY, 10:10AM
Notes for Venice

Grimani and Querini Stampalia are ten minutes apart and belong in the same morning, in that order. Grimani is emptied and architectural; Querini is furnished and layered, and it undoes the eye for anything austere that follows it.

Scarpa's ground floor at Querini is the reason to come and the thing most people walk straight through on their way to the pictures upstairs. Sit down in it. The water is meant to be there.

February is cold, half-lit and entirely yours. The city empties, the queues elsewhere shorten to nothing, and both of these houses behave as though they had been kept for you.

← Italy Last walked in February, with the acqua alta boards out. Florence →