Ca' Pesaro

Ca' Pesaro is the palace where Venice keeps its modern art, and it is one of the most underrated museums in the city. The building itself is a baroque showpiece by Baldassare Longhena, with a rusticated facade rising straight from the Grand Canal, a grand courtyard and huge reception halls on the upper floors. In the early twentieth century the palace was left to the city, and it became the International Gallery of Modern Art, built up largely through purchases made at the Venice Biennale, which explains the quality and range of the collection: works bought fresh from the exhibitions by a city that wanted to be modern. Highlights include Gustav Klimt's Judith II, a sinuous, gold-flecked femme fatale that is one of the most famous paintings in Venice, Marc Chagall's Rabbi of Vitebsk, Wassily Kandinsky, a cast of Auguste Rodin's Thinker, sculptures by Medardo Rosso and paintings by Italian masters of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, alongside Venetian painters who show the city's own path into modernity. The top floor houses an entirely different collection, the Museum of Oriental Art, assembled by a Bourbon prince on a long voyage through Asia in the late nineteenth century and especially rich in Japanese art of the Edo period, with lacquer, armour, swords and painted screens displayed in old-fashioned cases that are themselves a period piece. Temporary exhibitions run in the ground-floor and side galleries, and in the autumn of 2026 the museum hosts a major Jenny Saville show, open until 22 November 2026.

Visiting: Ca' Pesaro is in Santa Croce, close to the San Stae vaporetto stop on line 1, and is closed on Mondays; check winter opening hours, which are shorter. Tickets can be booked through Tiqets with an entry window or bought at the door, and the civic Museum Pass covers it if you are planning several MUVE museums. The Museum of Oriental Art is reached on the top floor of the same building; ask at the desk about access with your ticket, as arrangements for the two collections have varied over the years. Allow about an hour and a half for both.

Why go: Venice is so focused on its Renaissance past that visitors forget the city was also a hub of modern art, thanks to the Biennale, founded in 1895. Ca' Pesaro tells that story better than anywhere else, and it is calmer than the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with which it pairs beautifully; the Guggenheim covers the international avant-garde, while Ca' Pesaro shows what Europe and Italy were painting at the time and what the Biennale chose to buy. Do not miss the views of the Grand Canal from the windows of the great hall.

Pairing: from Ca' Pesaro it is a short walk to the Rialto Market for a morning of food shopping and cicchetti, or a short traghetto or vaporetto ride across the Grand Canal to the Ca' d'Oro, a Gothic palace with a very different collection. The San Stae church next door opens for occasional exhibitions, and the lanes of Santa Croce, among the least touristy in the centre, are worth a slow wander. If you are choosing between Venice's modern-art museums with limited time, take the Guggenheim for the famous names in an intimate house, Ca' Pesaro for a grand palace, Klimt and room to breathe, and the Pinault venues for art made in the last few decades.