I arrived in Venice as the guest of Dries van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe (WoI July 2026), who have claimed this magical place as their own. First, they took an apartment in a palazzo on the Grand Canal that had belonged to the late designer and aesthete Victoria Press (WoI Dec 2015). She created such beauty in London, at home on Cheyne Walk, and, unbeknownst to me, an astonishing country house in South Africa built by Marco Zanuso. Victoria’s floor of the palazzo was preserved by her daughter, the environmentalist Jane da Mosto, and my friend the costume jeweller Vicki Sarge told Dries and Patrick about it. They saw it, and they took it. (And I stayed there.)
We were welcomed on the first night by Diane von Fürstenberg in her own glamorous pile, and on the morrow, Vicki, writer Cathy St Germans and I set out to meet Dries and Patrick at the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, their primary base, now home to the designer’s foundation and its inaugural exhibition, The Only True Protest is Beauty. It is a revelation: craftsmanship, fashion and applied art united in a dynamic and inspirational way.
We bought notebooks and handsome albums from Paolo Olbi, before heading to Peggy Guggenheim’s fantastic (albeit unfinished) one-storeyed Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. It had previously been occupied from 1910 to 1924 by the eccentric, extravagant Marchesa Luisa Casati, who had loudly declared: ‘I want to be a living work of art!’ (Doris Castlerosse, the notorious courtesan, was the next incumbent. It was bought for her by the American socialite Margot Hoffman, with whom she fled to New York when World War II was declared. Two years later, after a failed reconciliation with her former husband, the sixth earl of Kenmare, and full of shame about her swift departure from war-torn Britain, she took her own life.)
A revelatory exhibition, Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector, is on show here (and is coming to the Royal Academy in November). The heiress (WoI Dec 2019) spent 18 months in Mayfair before the war, staging a staggering 20 shows in her gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, during that period. That night we had dinner at Dries and Patrick’s dazzling apartment at the top of their palazzo.
The day after, we explored the weekend flea market, full of delectable goodies, as well as the sumptuous velvety leopard, tiger and zebra cushions jostling with Art Deco-motif ones and 17th-century examples at the nearby Bevilacqua textile house on Fondamenta Narisi.
I suggested we visit the Church of San Pantalon, which looks modest from the outside, with a rusticated brick façade. Once inside, however, one is greeted or, I should say, confronted by an astounding ceiling. It was painted on canvas, rather than directly on to the plaster, by Giovanni Antonio Fumiani. The Martyrdom and Apotheosis of Saint Pantalon took him 24 years to paint, and is considered the largest oil painting in the world, being made up of 40 canvases stitched together. John Ruskin, whose preference was for the lumpen Pre-Raphaelites, described it as being composed of ‘miracles of frantic mistake... the most curious example in Europe of the vulgar dramatic effects of painting’. I beg to differ. I find it a triumph of art and artistry. One sits utterly spellbound.
We went to Murano, island of glass, in a boat driven by Jane da Mosto, for a delicious lunch and on the way back stopped at the Church of Santa Maria Assunta ai Gesuiti, newly gleaming white. Inside it looked at first as though every surface had been wrapped in blue-and-white damask. Incredibly, it was painstakingly incised from marble – including the ‘drapes’ on a celestial pulpit. A painting here by Titian, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, in dramatic chiaroscuro, took my breath away.
Then I went off with Cathy to the Ca’Rezzonico, a magnificent palazzo dedicated to 18th-century Venice. On the first floor was mounted an exhibition of Calouste Gulbenkian’s impressive gathering of Guardis (although the exhibition is now over, one can nonetheless still see these works among a treasury of the Armenian businessman’s art objects in his own astonishing museum in Lisbon). On the second floor is displayed a collection of Pietro Longhi’s 18th-century scenes of contemporary Venetian life – including his study of Clara the rhinoceros, 1751.
I went to the Museo Fortuny, filled with the treasures that Mariano Fortuny and his wife, Henriette Negrin, created. It was better, dare I say it, in its prior incarnation, when Axel Vervoordt was curator, bringing its rich history to life.
I didn’t have time to do the Biennale, so I will return in September, when the crowds will hopefully have died down, and the weather is less oppressive, to take in all the glory at my leisure.
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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