Palazzo Querini Benzon is a palace in Venice, located in the San Marco district, overlooking the left side of the Grand Canal, between the small Casa De Sprit and Casa Tornielli (also called Ca' Michiel), at the confluence of the Ca' Michiel stream. Opposite are Palazzo Bernardo and Palazzo Querini Dubois.
Built in the early eighteenth century, the palace became famous thanks to the noblewoman Marina Querini (1757 - 1839), wife of Pietro Giovanni Benzon, who in the period straddling the end of the Venetian Republic (1797) made her residence one of the most renowned literary salons Venetians, thanks to the attendance of many important artists of the time where the most famous artists and writers of the time gathered including George Gordon Byron, Thomas Moore, Antonio Canova, Ippolito Pindemonte, Vincenzo Drago, Cesare Arici, Stendhal, François-René de Chateaubriand and Ugo Foscolo.
A building with no particular architectural merits, it has a water
portal with a stairway, a noble floor with a four-light window with
round arches flanked by two pairs of single-lancet windows, all with a
small balcony. The second floor was created in 1897 as an imitation in
reduced forms and of lesser value of the main floor. Above the cornice,
in a central position, there is a balustrade terrace. The entire facade
is plastered with the exception of the ground floor which is in stone,
excluding the mezzanine. On the roof there was a large dormer with four
rectangular windows and a gabled roof.
In 1897 the building was
raised with the construction of a second noble floor with windows equal
to those of the lower floor while the terrace was built on the roof. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the serliana on the
ground floor was completely transformed, unifying the side windows of
the portal which became large windows with an all-round arch. Today it
houses private homes.