Ca' Pesaro

Ca’ Pesaro tickets: one entry for two museums and the exhibition

Ca’ Pesaro’s gallery rooms hold Rodin’s Thinker and Chagall’s Rabbi of Vitebsk. The second floor is given over to the temporary exhibition, and above it the Museum of Oriental Art begins with armour, lacquered saddles and a lady’s palanquin from Edo Japan.

Our Ca’ Pesaro ticket costs €15, or €9 for children aged 6 to 14, students up to 25 and over-65s, with ID; under-6s go in free. There’s no time slot: it’s good for any day the museum is open, though once bought it can’t be cancelled.

If you also want to see where Mariano Fortuny, painter and fabric designer, had his home and workshop, the Ca’ Pesaro and Fortuny combo is €20, with one entry to each museum, which works out cheaper than our two single tickets.

What’s on at Ca’ Pesaro this autumn, and where Klimt’s Judith went

The painting that guidebooks still call the star of Ca’ Pesaro isn’t in the building right now. Gustav Klimt’s Judith II left on 21 September for MUVEC, the civic museums’ exhibition space in Mestre, on the mainland, where it’s part of Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and the Body in Contemporary Art until 14 February 2027. Your Ca’ Pesaro ticket gets you a reduced ticket to that show, and no pass covers it.

What you do get here, until 22 November, is the first big exhibition in Venice of Jenny Saville: more than 30 paintings and drawings, including a new cycle she made for Ca’ Pesaro, and it’s in the ticket. In the Project Room next to it, Nicolás Lamas shows Corpus serialis, with free entry, until the same day.

The museum hasn’t announced what follows Saville on the second floor.

What to see in Ca’ Pesaro, floor by floor

You come in through the portego, the long hall that crosses the palace from the courtyard, with its well, to the water doors on the Grand Canal. The café is here, open to anyone, with a view of the water, and so is “Cecilia”, a public piano, the first one put in an Italian museum.

The gallery upstairs grew from what the city bought at the first Biennales, Venice’s big international art shows, from 1897 on. Besides the Rodin and the Chagall, its rooms hold Italian sculpture and painting by Medardo Rosso, Boccioni and Arturo Martini. Gifts added more: Morandi, de Chirico, Kandinsky and Miró in the 1960s, then drawings by Schiele and Klee, and in 2022 post-war work that includes Marina Abramović.

The Museum of Oriental Art fills seven rooms with Japan, nearly all of it from the Edo period (1603–1868). Past the armour, blades and saddles come paintings, embroidered silks and two rooms of gold lacquer made for brides’ trousseaux. The last rooms leave Japan behind: jades, porcelain and a painted scroll from China, then Thai silver, kris daggers and wayang puppets from Southeast Asia.

The collection is what Enrico di Borbone, Count of Bardi, bought on a journey to the Far East in 1887–89. In 1907 it passed to Trau, an Austrian firm, which went on selling pieces until the First World War. After the war the Italian state took the collection as war reparations, and the museum was set up on the top floor in 1925–28. It holds about 20,000 pieces, shown in rotation.

Two hours is about right for the gallery, the Saville show and the top floor, and if you’d rather keep the top floor short, the Museum of Oriental Art’s own one-hour route, Gli imperdibili, picks out what not to miss.

Ca’ Pesaro with a Venice museum pass

Ca’ Pesaro is one of the civic museums run by MUVE, the foundation that also runs the Doge’s Palace, and the two passes built on those museums both cover it.

To choose between them, read Venice Pass and Venice’s museum passes.

When Ca’ Pesaro is open: Tuesday to Sunday

From November the museum closes at 17:00 instead of 18:00. Staff start closing the rooms 20 minutes before the hour, so don’t leave the top floor for the last half hour. Bags and trolleys bigger than one metre, measured as the three sides added together, don’t go in, but medium backpacks and umbrellas can go to the free cloakroom.

Longhena’s palace, and the duchess who left it to young artists

The Pesaro family started the palace in 1659, to a design by Baldassare Longhena, the architect of the Salute church and of Ca’ Rezzonico, and Gian Antonio Gaspari finished it in 1710, after Longhena’s death. From the water, look at the lower facade: the stone is cut in diamond points, above a base carved with lions’ heads.

Tiepolo was among the painters of its ceilings, though his Zephyr and Flora has hung in Ca’ Rezzonico since 1935.

Duchess Felicita Bevilacqua La Masa, whose family came to own the palace after the last Pesaro died in 1830, left it to the city in her will in 1898, for modern art and with studios for young artists. In 1902 it opened as the city’s gallery of modern art.

Ca’ Pesaro by vaporetto: the San Stae stop

Take vaporetto line 1 to San Stae. The museum is at Santa Croce 2076, about 70 metres from San Stae church. From there it’s a few minutes on foot to Palazzo Mocenigo and the Natural History Museum, and under 300 metres to the Rialto Market on the same side of the Grand Canal.