History

Palazzo Contarini Fasan is one of the smallest and most decorated palaces on the Grand Canal — a fifteenth-century Gothic front of carved tracery and wheel-patterned balconies, known in Venetian legend, with no real basis, as the house of Desdemona. Behind that façade, on the first floor, lies an ordinary apartment.

Sergio and Carla Bortoli bought it in 1989 and made it their Venetian home. They furnished it in the taste of the Settecento — Venetian and English pieces, eighteenth-century paintings, frescoed and pastel-coloured rooms, silver — and filled it with the books, photographs and belongings of a life in Venice. It became a portrait less of grand history than of how a family actually lived in the twentieth-century city.

On their deaths the Bortoli left the apartment to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, in 2017, asking that it open as a museum and a “window on the city”. The FAI restored it and inaugurated it in 2019. A dispute then arose over the right to cross the building’s shared courtyard, contested by other owners in the palace; a 2023 ruling went against the museum use, and Casa Bortoli is, for now, not open to visitors.