Palazzo Gradenigo is a palace in Venice, located in the Santa Croce district (768), near Palazzo Soranzo Cappello and the church of San Simeone Profeta. It overlooks the Rio Marin.
Built to a design by the architect Domenico Margutti, a disciple of
Longhena, at the end of the 17th century to be the grand residence of
the Gradenigo family, one of the most illustrious of the Venetian
patriciate. In the centuries of its splendour, the palace was the site
of grandiose parties, which were held in the Gradenigo gardens.
In the early twentieth century the same gardens, still intact, inspired
some places in Il Fuoco by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Currently, in good condition after being restored in 1999, the building
is only partially owned by the commissioning family.
The facade, articulated on three levels plus an attic opened by small
square windows, overlooks the rio, onto which two portals open on the
ground floor.
The two noble floors are asymmetrical: the first is
opened by a series of ten single-lancet windows with balustrades; the
second by larger windows with a mask, among which stands out, on the far
left, a quadrifora, which corresponds, on the facade overlooking the
garden, to a trifora.
It is precisely the garden that has made
the palace famous: in fact, until the beginning of the 20th century, it
was among the greatest prides of the Gradenigos, being one of the most
sumptuous in the lagoon city and being very vast: very little of it
remains, following the building development in the surrounding area.
Internally, much of the original pictorial decoration has been
tampered with; however, seventeenth-century stuccos and some
eighteenth-century frescoes attributed to Jacopo Guarana remain.