Casino Venier
Casino Venier is a palace in Venice in the Veneto region of Italy . It is located in the Sestiere San Marco with a view of the Rio dei Bareteri in the Mercerie , halfway between the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark's Square .
Casinos in Venice
The origin of the word “casino” (German: small house) or “Ridotto” (from German: reduce) provides an idea of what these places were: Small buildings, but cozy and intimate, where you can hang out after the theater Friends. Casinos were numerous in Venice until the 16th century, but it wasn't until the 18th century that these venues became a complete success: there were 118 of them in 1744, almost all of them near St. Mark's Square. They were places of mutual meeting, of fun and sometimes of debauchery, even real literary salons: People indulged in gambling , danced, made gallant encounters, but also talked about theater and the new philosophy that came to Italy from France .
description
From an architectural and decorative point of view, Casino Venier is one of the most distinctive. It was a game and conversation "ridotto" owned by the procurator Venier but used by his wife, Elena Priuli , an educated and refined noblewoman. It was located near the Ponte dei Bareteri above the portal to the water on the mezzanine floor of a rather nondescript building. Only the inside shows all its richness.
The arrangement of the rooms replicates the typology of the Venetian palaces with a central salon around which the other rooms are arranged symmetrically. In the second room from the right there is a Liagò , a small balcony covered with the Venier coat of arms in wrought iron , which could be seen unobserved from above. The interior decoration from the years 1750–1760 has been preserved intact to our days with original floors made of connected marble slabs . The stucco work and the frescoes , the mirrors and the chimneys, the doors in fine rosewood and the door handles and locks in bronze are also original . Hidden in the marble floor of the entrance hall, a small peephole allows people to be monitored: an ideal instrument for protecting the intimacy of this place. Behind the entrance stairs there is a small room furnished with wrought iron bars and gilded wood. It is probably the music room that, hidden, waited for the guests and whose music could be heard through the bars. Presumably the bars were also used to spy on what was happening in the room.
restoration
The interior of the Casino Venier required a lot of consolidation and cleaning work, which was made possible thanks to the commitment of the Comité Français pour la Sauvegarde de Venise , which funded the restoration work in the 1980s. We should also thank UNESCO , whose contribution made it possible to bring the frescoes back to light in 1992.
Casino Venier has been the seat of the Italian-French cultural society Alliance Française since 1987 .
Web links and sources
- Restaurant du Casino Venier . Archived from the original on March 6, 2008. Retrieved December 5, 2019.
- Casino Venier . Campiello Venise. Retrieved December 5, 2019.
Coordinates: 45 ° 26 ′ 10.1 ″ N , 12 ° 20 ′ 15.2 ″ E