Fontego dei Turchi, Venice

Fontego dei Turchi is a historic palazzo on the Grand Canal, now home to Venice’s Natural History Museum. Its story turns on trade: from the early seventeenth century until 1838, Ottoman merchants used this building as lodging, storage space, and a place to conduct business. Their goods included silk, cotton, leather, spices, wheat, and materials used by Murano’s glassmakers.

The arrangement also included restrictions on when residents could enter or leave and how commerce could be carried on. Look at the façade’s broad arches and its loggia, the continuous row of smaller openings above them. The restored frontage has ten ground-floor arches and eighteen openings in the loggia, with two small towers at the sides and merlons along the roofline.

Its appearance brings together Venetian Gothic elements with Islamic and Renaissance influences: the horseshoe arches and roof cresting are especially distinctive. Much of what you see was reconstructed after the building deteriorated; the government rebuilt it in 1869, while only the original canal-side façade survived from the earlier structure. Inside, the museum now presents fossils and other natural-history collections. The building’s most striking contrast is that a former Ottoman trading residence now shelters scientific specimens.