From the moment our host opened the door we were floored by how glamorous and romantic the home is. It's like living in an incredible museum that's off-limits to the general public, a 16th century palazzo with frescoes nicer than in many of the open museum-palazzos and the kind of exquisite terrazzo veneziana that people come here to study. The ceilings must be 30 feet up and as a result of that, the house stays nice and cool despite the lack of air conditioning and all those enormous Windows let in light and air. There are delicious cross-breezes that sweep from one end of the house to the other due to the excellent building design.

In the mornings, you wake up to reflected light playing across the ceilings and the gorgeous sound of oars slapping water as little old ladies row themselves along the canal. The home is out of the worst and noisiest tourist areas and is situated instead in a real Venetian residential area ( children playing soccer in the campo next door, men washing their boats in the morning, tradesmen asleep under tarpaulins in their boats after lunch, someone giving violin lessons on weekdays, lots of people walking their dogs and buying bread and vegetables) where it's clean and quiet and many homes are occupied and have flowers on the balconies and Tomatoes on the altanas.

It's a little alarming ( but also miraculous) to see the same furniture you are sleeping on in the displays at local museums, and even more so to see portraits of the doges who originally owned the house ( and from whom the current owner is descended) on the walls.

We loved the drying room, a little space tucked under the eves, where our clothing dried naturally in about an hour. We loved the huge and fantastically well-appointed kitchen with its table-sized marble sink and vast array of pots and cutlery. Every evening we gathered in the kitchen to cook together, eat and drink, and talk about our adventures of the day. It's an inviting and comfortable space, with soft couches, a great marble table that doubles as a place to prepare breads and pastries, and the feeling of living in the 1800's. The bathroom had amazing antique charm too, though we never ran out of hot water.

For lovers of the unique, the original, the beautiful and the genuinely old, this home is a remedy for the Disneyland experience that Venice can be today and a reminder of what it used to be like when Browning, Byron, Mann, Henry James and Hemingway, Peggy Guggenheim, Satre and Beauvoir, Cole Porter and others first stayed here.