Palazzo Testa is an architecture of Venice, located in the Cannaregio district and overlooking the Cannaregio canal.
It was built in the 15th century, but underwent numerous alterations
between the 16th and 19th centuries. From at least 1531 and until 1748
it belonged to the Testa family of ancient patrician origin from Novara,
and then, after the death of Uberto, the last of the lineage, it
belonged to Count Alessandro di Marsciano, taking over the Testa
primogeniture. It remained in the ownership of this family until 1808.
After various changes of ownership, in 1988 the property was
purchased by the Province of Venice and is now used, together with the
adjacent seventeenth-century building, as a branch of the Enrico Fermi
Technical and Technological Institute and the Francesco Algarotti
Technical Institute for Tourism.
The small facade is in the late Gothic style. It consists of two
floors with a mezzanine between the ground floor and the main floor.
On this last floor there are some valuable openings, all with
inflected and trefoil arches and closed in marble squares: these are two
pairs of side single-lancet windows, as well as another side window,
and, in the center, a quadrifora facing from a fifteenth-century balcony
supported by elegant corbels with lion protomes; even the cymatium of
the balustrade with small columns with Gothic arches is refined by two
marzocchi on the corners and three pine cones on the central piers.
The mezzanine is instead opened by a series of rectangular windows
framed by finely crafted Istrian stone.