The rear of a midsize palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal doesn’t look like much—a wrought-iron gate, a stucco wall, a few windows with black shutters. Step inside, though, and visitors will find themselves on the vast ground floor of one of the choicest palaces in the city. Spread across nearly 30,000 square feet, the 16th century mansion contains original frescoes, ancient silk wall coverings, and some of the finest plaster work in Venice.
“It’s all just gorgeous,” said Ann-Marie Doyle, director of Venice Sotheby’s International Realty, as she entered a ballroom dominated by a colossal Murano glass chandelier. “I could spend my life in this room.”
Someone could, certainly, but for the time being the palace is deserted. Its owner, the patriarch of an Italian banking family, died a few years ago. Since then, “it’s pretty much been empty,” said Doyle, save a single housekeeper, Manola, who keeps its grand halls presentable for guests who have yet to arrive. The deceased owner’s children “are all busy and live in different places,” Doyle said. “It’s the classic story of figuring out what to do with it.”
That might change soon: The house is secretly on the market. Far from hanging a “For Sale” sign on the Grand Canal, Doyle, at the behest of the family selling it, has done virtually nothing to promote the house. “The owners started out being super-, super-secret,” she said. “Now they’ve changed, at least a little.” By that, she means they’ve allowed her to post online a single image (of a wall, in a drawing room), along with a two-sentence description. And while the photos in this article haven’t previously been seen by the public, that’s as far as the owners will go. They still refuse to publish or even indicate a what it would cost—merely “Price on Request.”
Whisper Listings
The palazzo is one of Venice’s so-called “whisper listings,” houses that, for whatever reason—discretion, exclusivity, or a distaste for even the remotest hint of publicity—remain secret, available only to those who contact real estate agents, are vetted in advance, and who can demonstrate a willingness (and the funds) to invest their time and energy into the city of Venice.
“We select the people in advance,” said Serena Bombassei, head of sales for Venice Real Estate, an affiliate of Knight Frank. She was standing in the entrance hall of an apartment that comprised most of the piano nobile of a 15th century Gothic villa, also on the Grand Canal. The interior of the apartment’s main spaces are largely unchanged since the palazzo was built.
The silk brocade walls are flecked with gold thread, and are original. So, too, are the gold-leaf paneling in what’s now the bedroom, the elaborate frescoes that line the main reception hall, the painted beamed ceilings, and the clear Murano chandeliers that dot the apartment. Because of its historic nature, restoring the apartment is a daunting undertaking, which may be why its present owner has left the necessary updates to someone else.
“We want quality in this city. Money is important, but Venice needs help,” Bombassei said. “We need to maintain the beauty of the city, so we want people to buy property like this, but they also have to give back to the city, too. Venice is very small, and it needs to stay alive.”
To that end, Bombassei (and the apartment owner) opted to put the apartment on the market only via a password-protected website, and they refuse to acknowledge even a rough price range for the listing. The only dollar amount she’d mention was the estimated renovation cost: “It needs a complete restoration,” she said. “The price to do so would be about a million euros [$1.1 million].”
It’s one of five apartments she said she represents exclusively that are secretly for sale. “It takes a bit longer to sell,” she admitted. “But you can actually keep the price more firm this way.”