Palazzo Pisani Moretta was built in the second half of the 15th century for the Bembo family in the San Polo sestiere, on a bend of the Grand Canal between today’s Palazzo Tiepolo and Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza. The four-storey façade is one of the clearest surviving examples of Florid Venetian Gothic: a tall water-gate with pointed-arch portals supports two noble floors marked by superimposed hexafora windows, whose six-light mullioned openings with ogival arches deliberately echo the loggia of the Doge’s Palace. Polychrome marble panels, quatrefoil oculi and small flanking single-light windows complete a composition designed to be read from the opposite bank of the canal.

In the second half of the 18th century the palace passed to the Pisani Moretta branch of the Pisani family and was thoroughly reorganised under the patronage of Chiara Pisani. The architect Andrea Tirali removed the original external staircase and inserted a monumental double-flight staircase inside the courtyard, redefining the route from the water gate to the piano nobile. The state rooms were then entrusted to the leading painters of late-Settecento Venice: Giambattista Tiepolo frescoed Mars and Venus around 1743 in one of the principal halls; Jacopo Guarana painted allegorical ceilings in the music and reception rooms; Giuseppe Angeli and Gaspare Diziani decorated minor rooms and overdoors. Major canvases by Paolo Veronese and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta also hung in the palace until the 19th century, when works such as Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander were sold to the National Gallery in London.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries the building remained in private hands, undergoing conservative restoration campaigns that protected the 15th-century structure and the 18th-century decorative cycles. Ownership of the Sammartini family lasted from 1968 until 2025, when the palace was acquired by the Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten. The palace is not a permanent museum: it is opened by appointment for private events, weddings, gala dinners, exhibitions and corporate receptions, and it hosts the Ballo del Doge, the masquerade ball held during the Venice Carnival. Limited group visits can be arranged on request, while the façade is fully visible from the Grand Canal and from the vaporetto stops of San Tomà and San Silvestro.