The Venetian cardinal Pietro Barbo, nephew of Eugene IV and the future pope Paul II, began building it in 1455, on a spot chosen with care: beside the basilica of San Marco, on the ancient via Lata, close to the Capitol. Unlike the medieval residences of cardinals, which grew by the irregular aggregation of different buildings, this one was conceived as a whole from the start, and it is among the first great civil palaces of the Roman Renaissance. It was built partly with ancient material as well: the use of travertine recovered from the Colosseum and from the Theatre of Marcellus is documented.
What to see
Who designed it remains an open question. The project has been given to Leon Battista Alberti, whom part of the criticism regards as the theoretical inspirer of the unified plan; to Giuliano da Maiano, who is certainly the author of the great main portal; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to Bernardo Rossellino as well, although his death, which came while the work was still going on, makes any hand of his in the later stages unlikely. Criticism today tends instead to give a central role to Francesco del Borgo. Beside the architects worked the marble carver Jacopo da Pietrasanta and Lombard and Comacine craftsmen led, according to Giuseppe Merzario, by Manfredo di Antonio di Como. The heart of the place is the courtyard with its loggia of two tiers of arches; the Palazzetto that stood next to it was instead pulled down and rebuilt in another position.
Visiting
The building changed hands along with the map of Europe. In 1564 Pius IV granted it to the Republic of Venice so that it might keep its ambassadors to the Holy See there permanently: from then on it has been called Palazzo Venezia, and for more than two centuries it was the centre of Venetian politics in the Rome of the popes, one of the first permanent embassies in the city. Once the Republic was gone, the palace passed to Austria, which inherited the diplomatic post with it and held it for more than a century. During the risings of the mid-nineteenth century some patriots tried to occupy it, seeing it as a symbol of Austrian rule, and according to the memoirist Raffaello Barbiera the poet Francesco Dall'Ongaro is said to have fixed on it a sign reading Palazzo della Dieta Italiana. In 1916, in the middle of the war, the Italian state expropriated it.
Our editors' tip
Raise your eyes to the balcony over the square. At the end of the nineteen-twenties Mussolini moved his political headquarters here and set his office in the Sala del Mappamondo, the room of the great globe; a tradition widely put about during the regime had it that the light was always left on, to show that the head of the government was keeping watch. From that balcony he announced to the crowd the proclamation of the Empire after the conquest of Ethiopia, Italy's departure from the League of Nations and the entry into the second world war. And in the same building, on the night between the 24th and the 25th of July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism passed the Grandi motion that brought Mussolini down.