Palazzi di Venezia
From their beautiful windows to their tall, elegant facades, every piece of a Venetian palazzo has a reason behind it. One odd characteristic of Venice’s palaces is that
they don’t face the streets… the palaces face
canals! Of course, since Venice’s canals are its streets. Because of how many people would see your canal-facing facade, you’d make sure that your facade showed not just style, but
wealth. Showing how rich you were was especially important in Venice — since it was a merchant city, money and power were closely intertwined.
With space at a premium, even wealthy families had to compensate by building up, not out. Venetian palaces, therefore, usually look tall and elegant, not broad and formidable. Venetian palaces boasted balconies to allow their residents to get a bit of air. The lack of open space inside could also make the buildings very dark and dreary — so builders opened up the palaces’ facades with big windows, loggias and arcades, letting light into the interior of the house.
Another way around the lack of land was by building “double palaces.” Instead of every family building their own house, two parts of a noble clan might live in one palazzo, splitting it by each having its own water gate — the reason why you sometimes see two doors onto the water in the same building.
One other oddity of Venice’s palaces is that they have big, funny-shaped chimneys, usually in the form of an upside-down cone or pyramid. The reason is simple: Fire was a constant threat in any city, but for a city built on water, it was all the more frightening. Plus, with all of those wooden ceilings and beams, it would spread quickly! As a result, the chimneys were designed to keep embers from escaping… and lighting that pretty palazzo you’d put so much effort into on fire.
