no more than a grandiloquent ground floor, because the
original builders went bankrupt before it was completed.
Up until 1949, it was let to the eccentric Marchesa Luisa
Casati, who also had an affair with D’Annunzio and
threw parties where the guests were welcomed by naked
servants. Peggy, niece of Solomon Guggenheim who went
on to establish the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation,
bought the palace in 1949 and here indulged her love of art
–
and artists. By her own admission she had a voracious
appetite for men and was involved with the Dadaist
sculptor Laurence Vail (her first husband), the writer John
Holms, the painter Max Ernst (her third husband) and
Samuel Beckett. Today, the Palazzo Nonfinito houses her
collection of 20th-century art, as well as her own grave
and those of her beloved dogs.
On the opposite bank, we now see Palazzo Barbaro,
which rises up from the water in a mass of balconies and
gothic windows. For decades, this was a home for visiting
Americans. It was owned by a relative of John Singer
Sargent, and played host to Henry James, Edith Wharton
and Cole Porter.
James finished his novella
The Aspern Papers
in
Palazzo Barbaro. He also set much of his bitter love
story,
The Wings of the Dove
,
in its ballroom, describing
the palace as “a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about
with decorations... fronting the great canal with its gothic
arches. The casements between the arches were open,
the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the canal, so
overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the
loose, white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have
said what.” This story was filmed with Helena Bonham-
Carter and Linus Roache in 1997, using Palazzo Barbaro as
its main location.
A few blocks closer to San Marco stands the Gritti
Palace, which re-opens this month and is the only
hotel on the Grand Canal with a rooftop swimming
pool. Built as the Palazzo Pisano-Gritti, this old, heavy,
rectangular Venetian palace may not stand out against the
many ornate structures that hug the waterline, but it
»
We pass the darkened 17th-
century Palazzo Giustinian
Lolin, where the poet
Gabriele D’Annunzio fell in
love with society hostess
Olga Levi in the 1920s
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