Venetian Housing and Domestic Interiors

In Venice, in northeastern Italy, under the Republic that ended in 1797, a household’s home depended on income, occupation, property rights and place. In the lagoon city, some residents rented rooms or lived with employers, while wealthier patricians, members of the hereditary ruling nobility, occupied palaces. Venetian landowners also maintained residences on the Terraferma, the republic’s mainland territory.

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Renting and living with employers

Owning a home was beyond many residents. In the western district of Santa Croce, late-sixteenth-century wool weavers rented from landlords who regarded them as poor and unreliable tenants. Ordinary residents also rented dwellings or workshops within patrician palaces or their courtyards. Some servants lived in an employer’s household, and apprenticeship contracts could make the master responsible for a young learner’s lodging and personal care.

Water access could vary even among householders. A widow with four children who owned a ground-floor flat at Secco Marina reported in 1537 that it had no water supply and that the family suffered for it. Many residents depended on shared public cisterns or water carriers, while wealthy palace households could draw from courtyard cisterns. Her account links the comfort of a home to its access to water.

Rooms and household equipment

A 1566 tax declaration for surgeon Giovanni Andrea dalla Croce lists two small rooms, a little hall and a kitchen where a light had to be kept burning continually. The declaration also says the house belonged to his wife’s dowry.

Inventories made after deaths from 1651 to 1797 list beds with mattresses and linens, wardrobes, chests and tables. Clothing and household textiles appear in storage furniture; wine barrels appear in cellars, while attics could hold furniture or other possessions. In historian Mattia Viale’s sample of inventories, nine in ten from 1651–1700 list cooking pots and pans. Kitchens also contained cauldrons, frying pans and dishes for roasting meat, baking bread and frying fish. During the eighteenth century, inventories increasingly record utensils for hot drinks and more specialized rooms. Pictures were already common in the sample, while mirrors became more widespread, appearing in 88 percent of the 1751–1797 inventories.

A palace’s central hall

In patrician residences, the portego was a broad central hall used to move between rooms and receive visitors. It usually occupied the piano nobile, the principal residential floor above the ground-level entrance and service spaces. Windows brought light into the hall, while adjoining rooms served other domestic uses. The central hall organized the public-facing part of a wealthy home, and its furnishings could communicate the family’s status.

At Palazzo Mocenigo, a ceiling painted for a wedding in 1787 decorates the central hall and adjoining rooms. The present museum display combines furnishings and paintings with objects from other collections, presenting an interpretation of aristocratic domestic life.

Homes beyond the lagoon

In a 1661 property declaration, Priamo da Lezze and his brothers called their house at Croce in the Trevigiano, the Treviso district on the mainland near Venice, “a house for our use.” The declaration describes gardens and barchesse, service buildings, around the residence. This mainland property record shows how a Venetian family’s rural home stood within a larger estate.