The Palazzi Contarini degli Scrigni and Corfù are two palaces in Venice, located in the Dorsoduro district and part of a single complex overlooking the Grand Canal, between Palazzo Mocenigo Gambara and Rio San Trovaso.
The two palaces of the Contarini family are very different because
they were built almost two centuries apart: Palazzo Corfù (the one on
the right) is a 15th-century building, partly remodeled between the 18th
and 19th centuries; palazzo degli Scrigni (on the left) is instead from
the years 1609-1616, a work attributed to Vincenzo Scamozzi.
In
1777 Tommaso Scalfarotto had an embankment built to reinforce the facade
on the Grand Canal. In 1838 the Contarinis left the palace, which passed
first to the Countess Matilde Berthold, who remodeled the interiors, and
then to Peabody Russell, a wealthy American art dealer. Fortunately, his
plan to tear down the two buildings to build a grander one was
abandoned.
The palaces were then purchased by Riccardo Rocca
(emeritus lawyer of the Kingdom awarded the title of Count in 1900): in
this period eminent personalities such as the Imperial princes Charles I
and Otto of Habsburg, Gabriele D'Annunzio, the musician Mascagni,
Guglielmo Marconi, Aimone and Amedeo Dukes of Savoy Aosta and the famous
French actress Réjane, to whom a plaque is dedicated.
In 1985 the
Princes of Wales Charles and Diana were guests of the palace and for the
occasion they were accompanied to the panoramic turret.
Contarini Palace Corfu
The oldest building is in the Gothic style,
on three floors with a large portal on the canal. The facade shows the
two noble floors structured according to a similar scheme, with an
elegant quadrifora with pointed arch balustrade in the center and two
ogival single-lancet windows on each side: all the openings are
inscribed in a rectangular frame.
Internally we note the presence
of eighteenth century frescoes, the trace of which is also visible on
the back of the building.
Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni
Also
three floors and the same height, the seventeenth-century building shows
a completely different layout, with typically Renaissance lines.
The facade on the water starts with the ashlar on the ground floor,
pierced in the center by the portal. The two noble floors are covered in
Istrian stone and symmetrically opened by five single lancet windows,
all with protruding balustrades and separated by pairs of Corinthian
pilasters. Centrally the facade has an elevated part, worthy of note
because it contains a small serliana.
Despite the stylistic
differences, it was built in such a way that internally one does not
feel the passage from one building to another, given that the floors
have ceilings of equal height.