Fondaco dei Turchi

The dukes of Ferrara had the run of this 12th-century mansion until they were elbowed aside in 1621 to make room for Venice’s most important trading partner: Turkey. For centuries the building served as a way station and warehouse for Turkish merchants, who were a constant in Venice throughout the on-again, off-again relationship between maritime powers, celebrated with favoured-nation trading status and inter-Adriatic weddings, and marred by occasional acts of piracy, invasion and looting. The Fondaco dei Turchi remained rented out to the Turks until 1858, after which the place underwent a disastrous modernisation that left few reminders of its medieval origins. Original features in the facade were sacrificed to the architectural fancies of the time, including odd crenellations that made the gracious Gothic buidling look more like a prison. Today it houses a scientific library and the rather half-hearted Museo Civico di Storia Naturale (Natural History Museum), which consists of two main displays. The first is on the ground floor: a rather small, sad fish tank containing Venetian coastal specimens bubbling for attention. On the 2nd floor is a more exciting display of dinosaurs, including an ouransaurus from the Sahara, a 12m-long prehistoric crocodile skeleton, and a 120-million-year-old psittacosaurus mongoliensis, a 0.5m-long skeleton of a baby dinosaur found in the Gobi Desert.