Palazzo Malipiero, formerly called "la Ca' Granda de' San Samuel" due
to its considerable size, is a palace in Venice located in the San Marco
district, near Palazzo Grassi and overlooking the Grand Canal.
The owners over the centuries have been innumerable and not all known,
among them we remember: the Soranzos, who probably built it, the
Cappellos, the Malipieros, who enlarged it to give it its current
structure, and the Barnabòs.
The building, built in the Byzantine
era, has a very articulated structure, due to the fact that each owner
has adapted the building to his own needs and tastes, bringing together
a great variety of architectural styles.
Built in Byzantine style probably between the 10th and 11th centuries
by the Soranzos, a family of very ancient origins very active in
commerce, who had, among other things, built, together with the Boldùs,
the facing church of San Samuele. The Palazzo, raised by one floor in
the 13th century according to the fashion of the time, passed around
1465, by marriage, to the Cappellos, another family dedicated to trade
and probably already in business with the Soranzos.
Around 1590
the Malipieros became tenants of the Cappellos and a few years later
Caterino Malipiero, following his marriage to Elisabetta Cappello and
subsequent purchases, obtained ownership of the entire building. We owe
him some restorations and expansions testified by the date 1622 and by
the initials K. M. - Caterino Malipiero - engraved in a relief above the
entrance door to the new large entrance hall towards the Campo and the
Church of San Samuele in which the proud weapon appears with rooster
claw of the family. The presence of men at arms was also strong in the
family, we remember for example Guido Malipiero "de' la Ca' Granda de'
San Samuel" (Palazzo Malipiero), the first Venetian bailo in Corfu to
whom the grateful Corfiots dedicated the small island in front of the
port of the city which until the end of the Venetian domination was
called "Scoglio Malipiero" and still today is called in Greek Vido
(presumably from Guido Malipiero).
Around 1725 the Malipieros
began massive restoration and enlargement works, thanks to which the
Palazzo took on its present compact and homogeneous appearance. The
Palazzo dei Cappello and dei Malipiero, for four centuries linked to
family successions with continuity of possession, suffered, after the
extinction of the Malipiero family in 1778 and throughout the 19th
century, the same fate as a large number of palaces of Venetian
patricians passing from hand to hand following multiple sales.
These changes of ownership seriously accentuated the decline of the
building, up to the purchase by the Barnabò family which, engaged in a
substantial restoration around 1951, returned the Palazzo and its
interior to an eighteenth-century layout.
We have little information about the events that took place in
the Palazzo even if it is certain that at the end of the 15th
century, the Cappellos, together with business, devoted themselves
very actively to the nascent publishing industry, printing numerous
volumes in the warehouses adjacent to the Palazzo di San Samuele
with their brand.
We also know that the Parish of San
Samuele, due to the construction of two theaters (the San Samuele
and the Sant'Angelo), which took place between 1656 and 1676, both
very popular and very successful, saw the urban fabric of the
neighborhood change it began to be inhabited by those who gravitated
around the theatres: actors, authors and impresarios. This also had
its influence on Palazzo Malipiero.
It is known, for example,
that Giacomo Casanova, born in Calle della Commedia (now renamed
Calle Malipiero) in a building adjacent to Palazzo Malipiero,
frequented it assiduously from 1740, having become familiar with
Senator Alvise II Malipiero known as Gasparo.
Here he had the
opportunity to weave a series of relationships with authoritative
characters and with a good number of ladies, until the day he was
surprised in too intimate attitudes in the company of Teresa Imer, a
young woman whom the elderly Alvise II had in love. Following this,
the young Giacomo was kicked out of the palace in a bad way. Despite
the mishap, Casanova has left us a lively and significant portrait
of Alvise II Malipiero in his Historie de ma vie for the
contribution it makes to the history of Venetian costume in the 18th
century. Even Carlo Goldoni, who lived in the nearby Corte del Duca
near Teresa's father, Giuseppe Imer, a well-known theater
impresario, was probably a guest of Senator Alvise.
In this
singular atmosphere of frenzy the Malipieros languished until they
died out in a passive decadence. The disappearance of the theaters
in the 19th century ended up completing what had begun with the fall
of the Serenissima, enveloping the Parish and the Palace in silence.
The Venetian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari died in Palazzo Malipiero
in 1948, having just returned from his self-imposed exile in
Switzerland during the Second World War. However, it was only around
1950, thanks to the foundation of the Centro di Palazzo Grassi, that
this corner of Venice recovered part of its cultural dynamism.
Palazzo Malipiero has also contributed by hosting the Barnabò Art
Studio since 1986 and since 1991 the headquarters of the multimedia
products publishing house Il Tridente, see http://www.tridente.it.
More recently, Palazzo Malipiero, since 1999, hosts the official
pavilion of the Republic of Slovenia at the Venice Biennale and
since 2011 the official pavilion of the Republic of Montenegro, as
well as many other art exhibitions. In the Palace, currently, a
museum that bears his name has been dedicated to Giacomo Casanova
and in which the history of the architectural development (briefly
summarized below) and of the events of the building in its 10
centuries of existence is reconstructed and told.
The Ca' Grande di San Samuele has, like all Venetian palaces, two
superimposed main floors, but in this case each is served by its own
independent staircase, water door and door onto the calle. The second
noble floor is accessed through the oldest Byzantine portal, while the
main door leads to the large seventeenth-century atrium, which leads to
the majestic apartment on the first noble floor to which are annexed a
large monumental courtyard, the door on the canal and the adjoining
eighteenth-century garden.
The architecture of the Palazzo
respects the tradition of many Venetian palaces in its development, with
the freedom and progressive harmony of structures typical of the city.
In fact, the building reveals the stylistic signs of its multiple
architectural nobility, indexes of three eras superimposed on each
other: the Byzantine, the Gothic and the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
The Palazzo was built, together with some buildings
behind it, by the Soranzos between the 10th and 11th centuries in
Venetian-Byzantine style, as evidenced by the large portal (at number
3201) and the quadrifora with humpbacked arches (today incorporated into
the later Gothic factory), located on the façade facing the Church of
San Samuele.
Towards the middle of the 14th century, the Soranzos
also added a second floor to their ancient Ca' Grande, as revealed by
the arched shapes of the windows. The new Gothic part thus adapted to
the underlying loggia floor, respecting and incorporating elements of
the Byzantine construction.
After the mid-16th century, the
Cappellos decided to expand the Palazzo, which had previously had a
visibly narrower and shorter layout, exploiting an empty space on the
side of the garden which led the façade on the Grand Canal to take on
the current length.
The expansion of the Palazzo continued with
Catterino Malipiero, who in 1622 completed the construction of a new
large entrance hall (the 3200) to the apartment on the first floor in
the place where previously there was a small building leaning behind the
one on the Grand Canal. In the second half of the 1600s, the Palazzo,
with its architectural appearance that ignores the Baroque, was among
the richest and most significant in Venice.
Finally, before the
middle of the 18th century, the Malipiero family completed a further
vast restructuring, following a complex project now lost, with the
intention of giving their Palazzo an even wider and more worthy form.
The Palazzo was then joined, eliminating the calle that divided
them, to the building on the rear side, unifying its appearance on the
facade towards the field. In addition to this, they expanded the garden,
also incorporating part of the Ramo Malipiero which bordered the
Palazzo, and thus created a new perspective axis which from the main
entrance on the campo led to the garden through the courtyard.
This is clearly demonstrated by a reproduction of the Palace made by
Carlevarijs around 1718. In the view it is clearly seen how the side of
the Palace towards the church ends immediately after the two access
doors and not, as today, about thirty meters after . From the press it
is also noted that after these doors the building was bordered by a
calle, called Malipiero, which has now disappeared (although in the
1900s the toponym was recovered by changing the name to the nearby Calle
della Commedia) where Giacomo Casanova was born.
In the 19th
century the Palazzo was perhaps neglected but its 18th century layout
remained intact and it was only with the beginning of the 1900s that
some recovery works began, until the Barnabò family, through the radical
restoration carried out in the fifties, under the supervision of Nino
Barbantini, did not definitively restore the ancient aspect to the
Palace, inside and to its single garden.
The garden of Palazzo Malipiero was built, with many others, at the
end of the 18th century, at the same time as the phenomenon of the
disappearance from the marginal areas of the city of the large palace
gardens, replaced by industrial, residential and productive expansion.
Probably due to the typology of the building, characterized by a
large entrance hall passing from the field to the courtyard oriented
transversally with respect to the entrance to the canal, the layout of
the garden is very original: the area, marked by a simple design of
boxwood compartments , extends along the side of the building with a
double system of alignment towards the courtyard and towards the Grand
Canal.
Therefore, if from the Grand Canal the garden is divided
into two specular parts, with the focal point coinciding with the
fountain representing the Nymphaeum of Hercules, entering the garden
from the seventeenth-century entrance hall one fully grasps the
perspective vision that connects the entrance hall itself to the
fountain and the grandiose Neptune inserted in the opposite wall of the
garden.
From the end of the 19th century, a rich statuesque
decoration contributes significantly to the scenography of the garden.
Furthermore, the use of boxwood, with its dark and intense chromatic
tones and its skilful pruning, embellishes the scenery and accentuates
its theatricality.
Anna Guglielmi (widow Barnabò, who died in
2016) dedicated herself to it with great affection, embellishing the
eighteenth-century layout by placing the magnificent Malipiero-Cappello
wedding well curb at the center of a floral plan, vivid testimony of the
union of the Cappellos with the Malipieros, with the coat of arms of the
Malipieros, on the opposite sides of which are also depicted the
likenesses of the two spouses, Caterino and Elisabetta.
For
years, she lavished her efforts filling the garden with every variety of
roses (chosen by her at the Vanderborre nursery and resumed the effort
of the Barnabò family to ferry the garden from the previous late
romantic nineteenth-century layout, with the side facade of the building
entirely covered by ivy, to a flower garden in spring thus bringing it
back to rediscover the ancient aspect much admired by all today's
visitors.