![]() ![]() War put an end to the revelry, however, and also to Doris’s life - she took an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1942. But back in the late 1930s Doris needed no help in asserting herself: during her first summer in Venice, the parties she hosted numbered the young Prince Philip and the film star Douglas Fairbanks among the guests. Today, interest in Doris has been revived by the celebrity of her great-niece, the model Cara Delevingne. Her palazzo refurbished to a luxurious gloss, Doris embarked on what she imagined would be a new career as a Venetian salonnière. Like a Lady Gaga of the early 20th century, Luisa disdained conventional vanity, attending the opera in a dress of swan’s down that moulted as she movedĭuring the early 1930s, her long list of lovers included Cecil Beaton and Winston Churchill, and as she approached middle age and her reputation began to sour, she looked to Venice as a city where she might relaunch herself. Most beloved of these pets was the elegantly spotted cheetah that accompanied her everywhere. Luisa hired an army of workmen to transform the interior into a dazzle of marble, glass and gold, but she was determined to retain the building’s dirty, overgrown and crumbling exterior.įurther evidence of Luisa’s maverick taste was revealed in the menagerie of pets that she began to gather around her - parrots, monkeys, snakes and peacocks, plus a flock of albino blackbirds that she would dye different colours to suit her mood. ![]() Venice was to be her theatre, the romantically derelict Venier palazzo her stage. Yet after falling under the spell of the notorious writer and aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luisa had turned her back on conventional society and, with a passion that bordered on profound eccentricity, vowed to turn her life into a work of art. As the wife of the Marchese Camillo Casati, she was allied to the highest ranks of Italian nobility. Luisa was one of the wealthiest women in Italy, having inherited her father’s industrial fortune. The first of the trio was Luisa Casati, who came to the palazzo in 1910. They did so with a style and a sense of female entitlement unimaginable to its original, male owners. ![]() It became known in the neighbourhood as the palazzo non finito - the unfinished palace - and it might have been demolished, excised from history, but for the three women who came to inhabit it during the 20th century. Ivy covered the walls, sections of the roof began to cave in, and the basement was converted into a cheap boarding house. Over the years, as it was sold off to different owners, deterioration set in. Whatever the cause, the Venier palazzo was left at a dwarfsh approximation of its intended size. It is possible that the builders failed to lay foundations deep enough to support the palazzo’s weight, but equally likely that construction was brought to a standstill by a decline in the family’s fortunes or their failure to produce a new generation of male heirs - and then, before work could be restarted, Napoleon invaded the city. Yet as work began around 1751, it came to an abrupt halt. ![]() The Venier family, who commissioned it, ranked among Venice’s most powerful dynasties, and their new palazzo - five storeys high and strutting with pillars and pediments - was intended as a monument to the family name. ![]()
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