Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Fondazione Querini Stampalia tickets: one ticket for the whole palace, all day

One ticket takes you through everything at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia: the house museum, the Carlo Scarpa ground floor and garden, the collection on the third floor and the temporary exhibitions. Ours costs €17, with a reduced price of €13.50, and there are no refunds on it.

There’s no time slot to keep and no queue-jumping lane, and the ticket is valid for the whole day you visit. The café and the bookshop are free to walk into, and so is the library for over-16s with a reader’s card. Under-18s go in free, so you only need tickets for the adults.

The Querini Stampalia on the Venezia Unica City Pass

The Venezia Unica City Pass includes the Querini Stampalia in every version. The San Marco version covers the four museums on St Mark’s Square, the Doge’s Palace among them, plus the Querini and the Scuola Grande dei Carmini. The All Venice version has the museums the city runs plus those same two, while the Museum Pass on its own, for the city’s museums, doesn’t include the Querini.

How the City Pass compares with Venice’s other passes is on our passes page.

Carlo Scarpa’s ground floor and garden at the Querini Stampalia

Between 1959 and 1963 the architect Carlo Scarpa redesigned the palace’s ground floor and garden, and his work is the first thing you see. You come in over a bridge of wood and iron from the Campiello Querini, through what used to be a window in the canal front.

Scarpa didn’t try to keep the high tide out: the water gate has maze-like grilles that let the tide in and hold it in channels inside. In 1961 Giuseppe Mazzariol recalled Scarpa putting it simply: “Inside: the high tide comes inside, like in the rest of the city.” The entrance hall has a marble floor laid like a broken-up chessboard, and beyond it is the Sala Luzzatto, Scarpa’s take on the portego, the long central hall of a Venetian palace.

The bridge at the front has 14 steps, so the step-free way in is at Corte Nova, Castello 4793/4794, where you ring or phone to be let in. A lift serves every floor of the museum, but the Scarpa rooms and the garden are protected heritage and can’t be reached in a wheelchair.

The Querini house museum: Bellini, Longhi and Gabriel Bella

The house museum fills the second floor, in rooms still furnished as a home that you walk through in a circuit. Giovanni Bellini’s Presentation at the Temple, from around 1470, hangs in these rooms, and Pietro Longhi has no fewer than thirty pictures of Venetian life at home and in society, among them a hunt on the lagoon and a gaming room.

Gabriel Bella (1730–1799) fills a whole room, Scenes from Venetian Life, with his processions, state ceremonies and festivals. One of them is the women’s regatta on the Grand Canal.

The ceilings, by Jacopo Guarana, were painted in 1790 for the marriage of Alvise Querini, the last ambassador of the Venetian Republic to France, to Maria Teresa Lippomano, and the Sèvres porcelain in these rooms is the service he bought in Paris.

Palma il Vecchio’s portraits, commissioned by Francesco Querini between 1515 and 1528, hang among Murano chandeliers, globes, clocks and the family’s musical instruments. Contemporary pieces turn up among the old rooms too, starting in the first room with Elisabetta Di Maggio’s Muro #5 (2004). Upstairs, the third floor has the collection of the Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, a Venetian savings bank, now shown as the Intesa Sanpaolo collection. It runs from Tintoretto to the sculptor Arturo Martini, in rooms by Michele De Lucchi (2015–2018), and the temporary exhibitions go up there too.

Count Giovanni Querini Stampalia and the library he left to Venice

Count Giovanni Querini Stampalia, born in 1799, was the last of his family. The Stampalia in the name is Astypalaia, the Aegean island Venice had granted the Querini. He studied law at Padua, refused to marry, and in 1852 was the first to try out electric public lighting in Venice.

His will, written at the end of 1868, left it all for public use: “My library, gallery, medal collection and art objects housed in my palace at San Zaccaria will be of public use.” He died in May 1869, and the foundation was set up a month later for what he called “the cult of good studies and useful disciplines”.

The library on the first floor, about 400,000 volumes, is still in use, and Venetians call it their library. Its reading-table lamps are by Scarpa.

Querini Stampalia opening hours, and the walk from the vaporetto

Bags go in the cloakroom, free while there’s space. Only guide dogs are allowed in, and you’re welcome to sketch as you go.

The palace is by Campo Santa Maria Formosa, at Castello 5252, and you walk there from the nearest vaporetto stops, Rialto and San Zaccaria. Lines 1 and 5.2 both stop at San Zaccaria.