Description
The Fondazione Querini Stampalia is at once a library, a house museum and a place of modern architecture, in a 16th-century palace in the Castello district. Here you pass from 18th-century Venice to Carlo Scarpa in the space of a flight of stairs.
On the second floor is the museum, a Venetian home furnished as it was in the 18th century: furniture, Murano chandeliers, a 244-piece Sèvres service, musical instruments and about four hundred paintings from the 14th to the 20th century, mostly of the Venetian school.
Among the paintings is the Presentation at the Temple by Giovanni Bellini. The most entertaining are those by Pietro Longhi, thirty canvases, and by Gabriel Bella: a chronicle of 18th-century Venice, with festivals, regattas, ceremonies of the Republic and hunting scenes on the lagoon.
The ground floor and the garden are the work of Carlo Scarpa, who redesigned them between 1961 and 1963: a new entrance bridge, a portego for exhibitions and conferences, barriers against high water and a garden at the back with mosaics by Mario Deluigi.
Don't miss, also by Scarpa, the barriers against high water at the entrance: before his intervention the ground-floor rooms could not be used when the tides came in.
The library, on the first floor, holds about 350,000 volumes, manuscripts, incunabula and maps. It has one particular feature: it also opens in the evening and on holidays.
That was the founder's wish. In his will of 1868 the nobleman Giovanni Querini Stampalia, the last of the family and without direct heirs, wrote that the library must stay open on the days and at the hours when public libraries are closed, and in the evening especially.
He left everything, palace, books and paintings, to a foundation for "the cult of good studies." Since 1997 the foundation has also commissioned works from contemporary artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Kiki Smith.
On the second floor is the museum, a Venetian home furnished as it was in the 18th century: furniture, Murano chandeliers, a 244-piece Sèvres service, musical instruments and about four hundred paintings from the 14th to the 20th century, mostly of the Venetian school.
Among the paintings is the Presentation at the Temple by Giovanni Bellini. The most entertaining are those by Pietro Longhi, thirty canvases, and by Gabriel Bella: a chronicle of 18th-century Venice, with festivals, regattas, ceremonies of the Republic and hunting scenes on the lagoon.
The ground floor and the garden are the work of Carlo Scarpa, who redesigned them between 1961 and 1963: a new entrance bridge, a portego for exhibitions and conferences, barriers against high water and a garden at the back with mosaics by Mario Deluigi.
Don't miss, also by Scarpa, the barriers against high water at the entrance: before his intervention the ground-floor rooms could not be used when the tides came in.
The library, on the first floor, holds about 350,000 volumes, manuscripts, incunabula and maps. It has one particular feature: it also opens in the evening and on holidays.
That was the founder's wish. In his will of 1868 the nobleman Giovanni Querini Stampalia, the last of the family and without direct heirs, wrote that the library must stay open on the days and at the hours when public libraries are closed, and in the evening especially.
He left everything, palace, books and paintings, to a foundation for "the cult of good studies." Since 1997 the foundation has also commissioned works from contemporary artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Kiki Smith.