Palazzo Ducale (Doges' Palace)

The gravity-defying Palazzo Ducale is Europe’s most dazzling secular building of the Middle Ages, a synthesis of the Romanesque, Gothic and Islamic, wrapped in a diapered pattern of white Istrian stone and red Verona marble.

No building of its period is as open and defenceless to the point of topsyturvydom as the Palazzo Ducale, its massive top-heavy upper floor like a strawberry cake held up by its own frosting–a form that echoes the basic structure of the city itself, of palaces supported by millions of piles.

But this fairy confection was all business, the nerve centre of the Venetian empire: the residence of the doge, seat of the Senate and a score of councils, of the Serenissima’s land and sea governments and and their bureaucracies, courts, and even the state prisons.

For Ruskin it was ‘the central building of the world’. The Venetians, more unassumingly, think of it as the valve of a rather large seashell.

History