Ca' Rezzonico

Ca’ Rezzonico tickets, the Settecento combo and the passes that include it

Our Ca’ Rezzonico ticket costs €15, and €9 for children aged 6 to 14 and visitors over 65. Under-6s go in free. The museum doesn’t work with time slots or bookings, so there’s no hour to stick to, and the ticket can’t be refunded.

Ca’ Rezzonico is one of three museums of 18th-century Venice, the Settecento, and the Settecento ticket, at €20, gets you into all three: this one, Palazzo Mocenigo and Carlo Goldoni’s house. You can cancel it up to 24 hours ahead. Plan the days with care, because each of the three closes on a different one: Ca’ Rezzonico on Tuesdays, Palazzo Mocenigo on Mondays and the Goldoni house on Wednesdays.

If you’re seeing more of Venice’s museums, two passes include Ca’ Rezzonico with nothing to book. One is the Venice Museum Pass, which covers the Doge’s Palace and the other museums the city runs. The other is the Venezia Unica City Pass, but only in its All Venice version, since the cheaper San Marco version leaves Ca’ Rezzonico out.

The Museum Pass costs €50. On their own, the Doge’s Palace is €35 with us and Ca’ Rezzonico €15, and the pass adds the city’s other museums on top. A third way to bundle it is the St Mark’s Square Pass, at €70.50, which puts Ca’ Rezzonico with the Doge’s Palace, the basilica or the campanile, and a digital audio guide. Our page on Venice’s passes compares them all.

Ca’ Rezzonico before the museum: Longhena, a Rezzonico pope and Robert Browning

The palace was begun in the mid-17th century for the Bon family by Baldassare Longhena, the architect of Ca’ Pesaro and the Salute church. Longhena died in 1682 with the building unfinished, and the Bons ran out of money.

In 1750 it was bought by Giambattista Rezzonico, whose family had bought its way into the Venetian nobility, and Giorgio Massari finished it in six years. In 1758 Giambattista’s son Carlo was elected pope as Clement XIII. Fifty-two years later, in 1810, the Rezzonico line died out.

The English poet Robert Browning spent the summers of 1887 and 1888 in the palace and died here in 1889, and Cole Porter rented it in 1926 and 1927. The city bought it in 1935 and furnished it with pieces from other palaces, to open it as the Museum of 18th-century Venice.

Tiepolo, Canaletto and Longhi at Ca’ Rezzonico

Giambattista Tiepolo painted this ceiling, the Nuptial Allegory, in the winter of 1757 for the wedding of Ludovico Rezzonico and Faustina Savorgnan. It’s on the first floor, the floor of the grand rooms, which you reach by Giorgio Massari’s staircase.

The first room at the top of the stairs is the ballroom, and for now it’s under scaffolding. You cross it along a corridor without seeing its frescoes of 1751 or its carved furniture by Andrea Brustolon, the woodcarver Balzac called the Michelangelo of wood, and there’s no date yet for the work to finish.

The rest of the floor is open, and the Throne Room still has the chair Pope Pius VI sat in when he came to Venice in 1782, under Tiepolo’s Allegory of Merit. Not every Tiepolo ceiling was painted for this house, though: Nobility and Virtue, in the Tiepolo Room, was bought by the city in 1934.

The second floor opens with the portego, the long hall through the middle of the palace, where the city’s only two Canaletto views in a public collection hang beside works by Francesco Guardi. More Guardi waits in the Parlour Room, among them his Ridotto, the city’s old gambling house.

On the same floor, the Longhi Room is hung with Pietro Longhi’s paintings of Venetians at home and out on the town. Look for The Rhinoceros, which shows Clara, the rhino exhibited at the Carnival of 1751, and look up at Tiepolo’s Zephyr and Flora.

On the same floor are the frescoes Giandomenico Tiepolo, Giambattista Tiepolo’s son, painted between 1759 and 1797 for the family’s villa at Zianigo, on the mainland, brought here in 1936. Il Mondo Novo shows a crowd seen from behind, gathered round a magic lantern show, and the Pulcinella room, finished in 1797, the year the Venetian Republic fell, fills the walls with Pulcinellas, the masked clowns of the commedia dell’arte.

Ca’ Rezzonico’s Tuesday closing, winter hours and bags

Ca’ Rezzonico closes on Tuesdays, and from November to March it shuts an hour earlier. The rest of the week it opens at 10:00 and closes at 17:00 in winter, with the last entry at 16:00, or at 18:00 from April to October, with the last entry at 17:00.

The rooms start closing 30 minutes before the doors do, so a 16:00 entry in winter leaves you about half an hour on the upper floors.

The museum is fully accessible, with a lift to every floor, though the old floors are uneven and some steps are irregular. The entrance is on the land side, at Dorsoduro 3136.

The easy way there is by water: the vaporetto stop has the museum’s name, and line 1 stops at Ca’ Rezzonico on its way from Piazzale Roma and the railway station, or from the Lido.