Venice's civic museums, the Fondazione Musei Civici

Map of 8 locations in Venice, Italy

Venice handed its museums to a single participating foundation on 3 March 2008, with the City of Venice as the only founding member, and that body now holds more than 700,000 works, five specialist libraries, a photographic archive and a store at the Vega park in Marghera. What it owns runs from the clock tower over Piazza San Marco to a lace school on Burano and a glass collection on Murano, so the holdings are scattered across the lagoon rather than gathered in one building. The houses are as much the exhibit as the collections: palaces, a playwright's birthplace, a designer's atelier, each given or willed to the city and then opened.

Places in this collection

  • Museo del Merletto di Burano — The museum opened in 1981 in the premises of the old lace school founded by Andriana Marcello on Piazza Baldassare Galuppi, and it shows Ve…
  • Museo del Vetro — The glass museum in Palazzo Giustinian was taken over by the city in 1923, and in 1932 the various glass collections were brought together…
  • Palazzo Fortuny — Known earlier as Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, the building was the house and atelier of Mariano Fortuny; his widow Henriette left it and its…
  • Casa di Carlo Goldoni — Palazzo Centani, where the playwright Carlo Goldoni was born in 1707, was donated to the city in 1931 and opened as a museum in 1952, enlar…
  • Palazzo Mocenigo — Alvise Nicolò Mocenigo gave his family residence at San Stae to the city in 1945, and the museum opened to the public in 1985 with an annex…
  • Ca' Rezzonico — The eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal was fitted out as the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice to a plan by Giulio Lorenzetti a…
  • Torre dell'Orologio — Built between 1496 and 1499 to a design by Mauro Codussi for the Senate of the Serenissima, the tower was inaugurated on 1 February 1499 an…
  • Museo Correr — The city's own collection, begun with Teodoro Correr's bequest, moved into the Ala Napoleonica along the south side of Piazza San Marco in…

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