The death of Léopold Robert, painter, at the Palais Pisani

In one corner of this beautiful Campo San Stefano, there is a terrace forming a hanging garden, and in a recess, back from the Palazzo Morosini, stands the gigantic Palazzo Pisani.

It is a seventeenth-century monument with a superb decoration that seems to evoke the actors in a drama on a beautiful night.


The courtyard of the Palazzo Pisani The courtyards and doors are closed, no guards, no servants; the high windows, where not a single lamp shines, testify to the solitude behind their uncurtained panes.

This palace, which once celebrated Napoleon I, now has as its guests only a few artists who have come to study in Venice.

Mr Mulazzani points out the wing of the palace occupied by the painters' studios.

There," he told me, "in a room on the second floor, one morning they found Leopold Robert bathed in blood, having cut his throat with a razor.

- There you have the drama," I exclaimed, "for this monumental corner of the square, which forms such an imposing setting; the simple, heartbreaking drama of a love that ennobles and kills.


The Pisani lantern Few characters: a princess playing with kindness and protection that inflame, a poor artist who despairs of passion.

His brother, trying to save him through friendship, forgetting that it seems inert and cold to hearts devoured by love; indifferent people spouting moral maxims; a cosmopolitan fast-lifter vegetating in the mysterious softness of Venice, preaching to the ideologue the consolations of matter and hastening through disgust his haughty suicide.

The corpse locked up bloody in the beer pushed back from the church, crossing the San Stefano cloister at night and carried from canal to canal on a gondola to the campo santo on the islet of San Michele [Note e-Venise.com: this is the cemetery island of San Michele].

- Where he actually lies, the baron tells me, in the section reserved for Protestants.

But let us leave this drama of a dead man, he added: what is the end of a man, however interesting or great, compared to the collective agony of a city that is dying like Venice?

Since you love it, this melancholy city that is decaying, gather in your poet's heart its supreme pulsations and its last vestiges of beauty. »
Louise Colet - The Italy of Italians 1862

A visit to the Palace By Louise Colet in 1862

The Basilica dei Frari

On leaving the church of San Stefano, I take a good look at the portal, which is covered in sculptures.

I turn onto the Campo; I cross it without stopping and head left, into the corte of Palazzo Pisani.

I ring the doorbell: a smiling porter comes to open the door; I ask him to show me the flat where Leopold Robert died.

He replies that he has never heard of this gentleman.

This reply reminds me that one day, in Paris, when I wanted to visit the room in the Hôtel des Vieux Augustins, which Charlotte Corday had lived in, in the rue of that name, the porter to whom I spoke replied: Madame, we don't have that woman here.”

To their credit, the ordinary Italians remember their illustrious men better than the French: they sing the verses of the poets and at least remember the names of the generals and princes who have defended or governed their country.

They like to give everyone nicknames that qualify them; they like this familiarity with glory. »
Louise Colet - The Italy of Italians 1862

Venice Panoramic View Pisani Palace