Palazzo Mocenigo

The Mocenigo were one of the great patrician dynasties of Venice, with branches in three different palaces and seven doges to their name between 1414 and 1779 — more than any other family except the Contarini. This one — the San Stae branch — was rebuilt in the late 17th century around an older Gothic core and lived in by the family until the line ended in 1954, when Count Alvise Nicolò Mocenigo bequeathed the building, its furniture and the family archive to the city of Venice.

The ground-floor rooms keep the family's furniture, paintings and ceremonial textiles. The piano nobile holds the city's historic costume collection: 18th-century court dresses, silk damasks dyed with cochineal and Indian indigo, men's heavy ceremonial coats with twelve buttons of seed pearls. Each room is staged as a working noble apartment of around 1750, complete with painted mannequins, gaming tables and porcelain.

Behind the costume rooms is the Study Centre for the History of Textiles, Costumes and Perfume — an active research library with more than 13,000 fashion plates from the 17th to the early 20th century, used by curators and theatre designers from across Europe.

Two rooms on the upper floor are given over to the perfume museum proper. Venice was, for a long stretch of the 16th century, the centre of European perfumery — the city's apothecary guild, the muschieri, supplied the courts of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. The collection includes original recipe books, a reconstructed perfumer's workshop and a wall of stoppered bottles you are allowed to lift to your nose.

The perfume rooms are the surprise. Try the muschiata di Venezia recreation — based on a 1555 recipe by the apothecary Giovanni Ventura.