Palazzo Querini Stampalia

Design-savvy drinkers take their spritz ( prosecco cocktail) with a twist of high modernism in the Carlo Scarpa–designed courtyard garden or Mario Botta–designed cafe of 16th-century Palazzo Querini Stampalia. The outer shell of this building dates from the first half of the 16th century, but the inside could not be more surprising: a 1963 bridge, 1940s entrance and garden, and 1959 1st-floor library all designed by Scarpa, with noteworthy 1990s Botta embellishments. Enter through the Botta-designed bookstore to get a free pass to the cafe and its garden, or buy a ticket to head upstairs to the 2nd-floor Museo della Fondazione Querini Stampalia. In a series of sumptuous, well-preserved 18th-century salons with period furniture mostly left where it was put by the Querinis c 1868, you’ll find some 400 paintings, mostly minor works and portraits of illustrious family members. The clear standout is Giovanni Bellini’s arresting Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, where the hapless child looks like a toddler mummy, standing up in tightly wrapped swaddling clothes. In a small annexe off a large hall before the Bellini is Scenes of Venetian Life, a series of some 70 folksy paintings by Gabriele Bella (1730–99). Rotating contemporary art installations add another element of the unexpected to these silk-draped salons and the top-floor gallery, and concerts and lectures held in the baroque music room on Fridays and Saturdays draw Venetian hipsters and old-timers alike.