Located in the heart of Venice, in a triangular area between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, and considered to be one of the oldest custom buildings in the city, the Punta della Dogana is an art museum. The area that this building is in is also called Punta della Salute or Punta da Màr and it faces the San Marco Basin.
Let’s find out something more about Punta della Dogana in Venice and why it’s worth a visit!
An historic landmark: Punta della Dogana’s origins
As previously mentioned, Punta della Dogana is nowadays an art museum that houses a big collection of French art. Its restoration was designed by Tadao Ando in the XVII century and it consists of a 5000 square meters building. It took over two years of work and 120 men to build Punta della Dogana and it nowadays houses over 300 works of art by various artists that were owned by Francois Pinault, the owner of Gucci.
The remarkable restoration of Punta della Dogana
The Punta della Dogana is obviously located in a not-very-favorable location to build. In order to pull the restoration of the original building off, everything had to be thought of thoroughly and many temporary work sites had to be built in the canal. Over ten thousand tons of construction materials were carried to the site with rafts, counting over two thousand trips and endless hours of work to bring everything to the construction site carefully. All of the workers had to go through frequent free health checks and had to attend seminars in order to learn how to work safely to build the site.
If you want to get to know more about the building’s restoration, there’s an interesting time-lapse of the work they did on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWfu0IqivrE&t=229s
Exhibitions at Punta della Dogana Museum
As said before, Punta della Dogana was opened to the public as an art Museum in 2009 and, since then, it has hosted many temporary exhibitions. Here’s a list of some of them:
- Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable by Damien Hirst;
- Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection;
- Prima Materia curated by Michael Govan and Caroline Bourgeois;
- Accrochage curated by Caroline Bourgeois;
- Dancing with Myself curated by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner;
- Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, curated by Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois;
Conclusion
The city of Venice is filled with great beauty and Punta della Dogana is definitely no exception. We highly suggest you make the time in your itinerary to visit it! If you want to get to know more about the city of Venice and Italy in general, check out our other blogs and book a private Venice tour with us!
