Beautiful facade in watercolour.
Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is one of Venice’s most fascinating palaces: an early Renaissance landmark on the Grand Canal, built for Andrea Loredan by Mauro Codussi and later transformed by a chain of powerful Venetian and foreign owners. It is now famous as the home of the Venice Casino and the Wagner Museum, but its real appeal lies in the layers of politics, family inheritance, art collecting, and intrigue that shaped it.
 
The palace was begun in 1481 and completed in the early 1500s, making it one of the first Renaissance buildings in Venice. Mauro Codussi was the original architect, and after his death the work was finished by the Lombardo workshop. It was originally commissioned by Andrea Loredan, a member of one of Venice’s great patrician families, and its facade became a model of balanced, classical Venetian design.
 
A popular place and a bit of a salon of intellectual and artistic society. One of the palace’s most famous stories is the death of Richard Wagner, who stayed there in 1882 and died in the building in 1883. That connection is now preserved in the Wagner Museum, making the palazzo both a monument of Renaissance Venice and a shrine to Romantic music.
 
Interesting facts...
The palace’s facade is linked to the inscription “Non Nobis Domine,” a humility motto that sits oddly against the building’s aristocratic grandeur.