Go Inside Venice’s Secretive, Elite Palazzos

Venice has been a tourist attraction since the Renaissance for good reason: the canals, alleys, hidden gardens, and outlandish architecture are like nothing else on the planet. Visitors can spend days or even weeks wandering the city, entering churches, and discovering something new at every turn.

There's a hidden world, though, which almost every tourist has been missing—the dizzying, gorgeous rooms within its richest residential homes. In Rizzoli's new book, Inside Venice: A Private View of the City's Most Beautiful Interiors, we finally have a chance to peek inside those palazzos.

The book is written by Francesco "Toto" Bergamo Rossi, the aristocratic head of the Venetian Heritage foundation who is perhaps most famous for restoring his own 17th-century Palazzo Gradenigo, whose giant piano nobile he reportedly occupies by himself. The forward is co-written by Diane von Furstenberg and the star architect Peter Marino (they note that "Venice's uniqueness made it something of a fourteenth-century Manhattan"). These are heavy-hitters, in other words, and thus it should be no surprise that the homes featured in the book are unique, personal, and often lavish beyond belief. Check out a few of them, featured below, for yourself.