An unexpected Venice
The Fondazione Querini Stampalia welcomes you and surprises you.
If you are looking for a less obvious Venice, you can find it here: rooted in the past and present, as has always been the case, it exudes culture via its treasures and activities.
The library houses almost 400,000 modern books, as well as manuscripts, incunabula, sixteenth-century texts, prints, and a vast photographic collection.
It maintains a nineteenth-century charm, whilst remaining closely connected with the modern world and is visited each year by thousands of students and scholars.
With its original furnishings, the museum home still has the air of being inhabited.
Visiting the family collections is a journey through the history of Venetian art, but not only: Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo di Credi, Palma il Vecchio, Giambattista Tiepolo, Pietro Longhi and Gabriel Bella can all be found here.
Our collections and spaces are the inspiration for educational activities, meetings, exhibitions and dialogue with the contemporary art programme ‘Conserving the Future’.
The architectural works by Carlo Scarpa, Valeriano Pastor and Mario Botta in the sixteenth-century palace and Michele De Lucchi’s interiors for the new museum spaces express the Querini’s mission: an exceptional educational programme regarding beauty, quality, connecting and respect in order to construct the future.
It is the mark of Venice, of which the Fondazione is an integral part: an unexpected place, full of charm – traditional and contemporary by nature.
Marigusta Lazzari
Director
Visite guidate in Querini
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organizza la tua visita
The 16th-century façade of Palazzo Querini with ‘The Material of the Ornament’,
a neon installation by Joseph Kosuth, 1997
“‘The Querini has the power to make your head spin. It is not a library. It is not a museum. It is a vortex.
Paintings and antique books. Architecture from the past and present. Contemporary art. Archive funds and photographic collections. All this is layered in a multidimensional, non-Euclidean hyper-object. The centuries and the staircases, the cubic metres and the stories collide.
A spatial-temporal capsule with a limitless capacity to inspire.’ “
Tiziano Scarpa, writer
Querini in versi. Cinque poeti esplorano la Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2020
An aspiration that goes beyond time
In his last will and testament of 1868, Giovanni Querini Stampalia founded an institution with the aim of ‘promoting the cult of good studies and useful subjects’. This remains the Fondazione’s mission: to be a place of research and learning, of meeting and relating, of personal growth and the spread of knowledge.
When it all began
‘My library, gallery, medal collection and art objects housed in my palace at San Zaccaria will be of public use’.
The year is 1868. Count Giovanni’s last will and testament signals the birth of the Fondazione, which was established the following year, in 1869: a visionary project that looked to the future.
Read more
Life of Count Giovanni
History of the Querini family
History of the Palazzo
History of the Library
History of the House Museum
History of the architectural interventions
Our network
The Querini Stampalia is the among the oldest cultural foundations in Italy.
Its importance is acknowledged by a vast network of public and private entities: the State, the Veneto Regional Government and Venice City Council above all, but also universities, national and international organisations, associations and companies.
The Fondazione organises projects and activities with these entities, which are growing in the number, variety and wealth of relationships.
