Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo is a late Gothic building in Venice, located in the San Marco district, near Campo Manin, and overlooking the Rio di San Luca.
The palace was built between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
as the residence of the Contarini "di San Paternian", who from the end
of the fifteenth century, due to the addition of the spiral staircase,
were nicknamed "dal Bovolo". In 1499 Pietro Contarini (perhaps Pietro di
Giovanni, father-in-law of Pietro Maria Del Bovolo who married Contarina
Contarini in 1502), Marco Contarini and Giovanni Battista Contarini,
senators of the Serenissima Republic of Venice, had a small building
added towards the internal courtyard in Renaissance style, characterized
by a series of open loggias with rounded or lowered arches.
In
1717 the complex passed to Giovanni Minelli who had married Elisabetta
di Pietro Maria Contarini, the last representative of the family. At the
beginning of the 19th century it was purchased by the Emery company,
from which it was rented to Arnoldo Marseille who opened a hotel called
"del Maltese" (hence the name of the Maltese court which overlooks the
building). In 1852 it was transferred by will to the parish of San Luca
and became the seat of the Congregation of charity.
In 1859, the
then lithographer Wilhelm Tempel conducted his first astronomical
observations from the tower's belvedere, with a telescope owned by him.
Here he discovered, on April 2, 1859, the comet C / 1859 G1, and on
October 19, 1859, the Merope Nebula in the open cluster of the Pleiades.
The building still belongs to the IRE of Venice, an acronym for
hospitalization and education institutions.
The building, located between the Rio di San Luca and Corte del
Maltese, has two very different facades.
Façade on the Rio di
San Luca
It has a simple, linear and elegant appearance, but
without particular aspects that can make this facade peculiar. It is
spread over four levels: the ground floor, the two noble floors and
the top floor. The ground floor is enriched by two pointed arch
water portals, flanked by smaller single lancet windows but also
pointed arches, arranged on two levels at the sides and on only one
in the centre. The three upper floors have a central five-light
window, each of which is flanked by six single-lancet windows, three
on each side.
Facade on the Maltese court
The back side
has a completely different look. Characterized by a sequence of
rectangular single-lancet windows and round arches, it finds its
part of greatest expressive intensity in the famous round scalar
tower with a spiral staircase. It is precisely called bòvolo in the
Venetian dialect. This kind of staircase was not unusual for the
time and for the context, but one of such large dimensions had never
been developed. The name of the family was enriched with the name of
Bovolo after this expansion.
The tower, designed by Giovanni
Candi or, in accordance with more recent hypotheses by Giorgio
Spavento, gives access to adjacent loggias, developed on five
levels, and continues its aerial style in the five orders of flying
buttresses on columns. The tower ends in a domed belvedere with a
wide view over the city. The tower was once adorned with frescoes
both inside and out, but few traces of such decorations remain
today.
Collections
The current owner has arranged a
remarkable collection of well curbs in the rear courtyard. Inside
the building there are paintings dating back to the 17th and 18th
centuries, also owned by the IRE.