Fondazione Levi - Fondazione

Palazzo Giustinian Lolin

Built in the fourteenth century, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, overlooking the Grand Canal, was given the appearance we see today in the early seventeenth century when the pre-existing building was restructured by Baldassare Longhena (1598-1684), a Venetian sculptor and architect, and the renowned architect of Basilica Santa Maria della Salute.

The project by young Longhena, his first for a residential building, respected the original building plan; the primitive Gothic style characteristics can still be seen in the soaring lines of the windows and the spatial arrangement of the ground floor, with an internal lateral courtyard overlooking what is today Calle Giustinian, with an entrance on the street side. Longhena redesigned and developed the plan of the elevation of the original building as well, using superimposed parastade orders to highlight the rhythmic symmetry of the façade. With Serlian windows and mural applications of Istrian stone slabs, the façade is divided into three levels and strips of equal dimensions. The combination of these architectural elements still belonged stylistically to a particular typology of the Venetian sixteenth century, hence the discrete nature of the decorations (for example, the garlands on the second piano nobile).

It was with this palazzo that the great architect began a reappraisal of the classic “Venetian house” which, while respecting tradition and consolidating equilibrium that were, too a certain extent, inevitable in such a model, was to lead to later works that were to renew the very image of the city. With a mezzanine floor, which was usual in Venetian palazzi from the 1400s onwards, the building consisted in two units, joined by wings that surrounded a large courtyard with a well-head. The main part houses rooms of different sizes on the ground floor and a vast hall on the piano nobile (which Longhena divided into two, creating rooms of more harmonious dimensions) with adjoining, interconnecting rooms, in the typical arrangement of a Venetian palazzo. All these rooms can be rearranged as modules for congresses, conferences, seminars, exhibitions and concerts.

In addition to the Giustinian family, other people who lived in the Palazzo include the famous medical collector Aglietti [Biograhical notes pdf, 2 Mb], the dancer Maria Taglioni in Gilet des Voisins, Duchess Maria Luisa di Parma, and the owner himself, Ugo Levi who, following the wishes of his wife Olga Brunner, left it on the condition it became the home of the same-named Foundation.