ties--Carnival costumes--Carpaccio and
Ruskin--Historical scenes--A pleasant garden.

The big palace on the other side of the Rio Foscari, next the shabby
brown, deserted house which might be made so desirable with its view
down the Canal, is the Balbi, and it has the distinction that Napoleon
stood in one of its windows to see a Grand Canal regatta, the races in
which ended at this point. Next it is the Angaran, and then a nice
little place with lions guarding the terrace gate, at the corner of the
Rio della Frescada, one of the prettiest of the side canals. Next we
come to another large and solid but very dull house, the Civran
(afterwards Grimani); then the forsaken Dandolo, and we are at the
steamboat station of S. Toma, where the passengers for the Frari and S.
Rocco land.

Hereabouts the houses are very uninteresting. Two more and a traghetto
and the Rio S. Toma; then the Palazzo Giustiniani, a rich Venetian red,
with a glimpse of a courtyard; then the ugliest building in the canal,
also red, like the back of a block of flats; and after passing the
pretty little Gothic Tiepolo palace with blue posts with yellow bands,
and the larger Palazzo Tiepolo adjoining it, we are at the fine
fifteenth-century Pisani Moretta, with a double row of rich Gothic
windows. Here once hung Veronese's "Family of Darius," now No. 294 in
our National Gallery, and, according to Ruskin, "the most precious" of
the painter's works. The story goes that Veronese being driven to make
use of the Pisani villa at Este as a temporary home, painted the picture
while there and left it behind him with a message that he hoped it would
pay for his board and lodging. The Pisani family sold it to the National
Gallery in 1857.

The next palace is the hideous Barbarigo della Terrazza, with a better
facade on the Rio S. Polo: now a mosaic company's head-quarters, but
once famous for its splendours, which included seventeen Titians, now in
Russia; and then the Rio S. Polo and the red Capello Palace where the
late Sir Henry Layard made his home and gathered about him those
pictures which now, like the Darius, belong to our National Gallery.
Next it is the Vendramin, with yellow posts and porphyry enrichment, and
then the desolate dirty Querini, and the Bernardo, once a splendid
palace but now offices, with its Gothic arches filled with glass. The
Rio della Madonnetta here intervenes; then two Dona palaces, the first
dating from the twelfth century. A tra