Description
The Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo is the Mocenigo family home in San Stae, in the Santa Croce district, turned into a museum of fashion, textiles and perfume: a hands-on way to discover how a noble Venetian family of the eighteenth century dressed, furnished its rooms and smelled.
The Mocenigo were one of the most prestigious families of the Venetian patriciate. This branch renovated the palace in the early seventeenth century and lived in it until the early twentieth, and the house still preserves period frescoes, stuccoes, marmorino plaster and floors.
The route runs through nineteen rooms on the piano nobile, laid out like an eighteenth-century home with the original furniture. The tapestries and curtains have been remade on the model of the old ones, with the shimmering colors of Venetian silk.
Among the furniture stand mannequins wearing period clothes and accessories, from the collections of the Centro Studi, telling how fashion, costume and fabrics changed. They look like the inhabitants of the house, caught in their own rooms.
The most original part is the perfume section, opened in 2013 after a long restoration. It tells a little-known chapter of the city: the ancient Venetian cosmetic tradition, which makes Venice one of the historic capitals of perfume.
Here you can see the bottles of the Storp Collection, from antiquity to today, which the essence house Drom has lent to the museum. The project was born with a Venetian perfume company, which supported it like a patron.
The palace deserves a look from outside too. It has two similar façades, one on the salizada of San Stae and one on the canal, opened in the middle by superimposed serliane, three-light windows with a Renaissance air; on the canal side, the third serliana serves as the water gate.
In 1945 the last of the family, Alvise Nicolò Mocenigo, left the palace to the City of Venice. A gift that ended up in court: a descendant through the female line contested it for years, and in the end obtained compensation.
The palace is also a place of study: it houses the Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume, with a specialist library, and the library of the Circuito Cinema.
The Mocenigo were one of the most prestigious families of the Venetian patriciate. This branch renovated the palace in the early seventeenth century and lived in it until the early twentieth, and the house still preserves period frescoes, stuccoes, marmorino plaster and floors.
The route runs through nineteen rooms on the piano nobile, laid out like an eighteenth-century home with the original furniture. The tapestries and curtains have been remade on the model of the old ones, with the shimmering colors of Venetian silk.
Among the furniture stand mannequins wearing period clothes and accessories, from the collections of the Centro Studi, telling how fashion, costume and fabrics changed. They look like the inhabitants of the house, caught in their own rooms.
The most original part is the perfume section, opened in 2013 after a long restoration. It tells a little-known chapter of the city: the ancient Venetian cosmetic tradition, which makes Venice one of the historic capitals of perfume.
Here you can see the bottles of the Storp Collection, from antiquity to today, which the essence house Drom has lent to the museum. The project was born with a Venetian perfume company, which supported it like a patron.
The palace deserves a look from outside too. It has two similar façades, one on the salizada of San Stae and one on the canal, opened in the middle by superimposed serliane, three-light windows with a Renaissance air; on the canal side, the third serliana serves as the water gate.
In 1945 the last of the family, Alvise Nicolò Mocenigo, left the palace to the City of Venice. A gift that ended up in court: a descendant through the female line contested it for years, and in the end obtained compensation.
The palace is also a place of study: it houses the Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume, with a specialist library, and the library of the Circuito Cinema.