anched into dusty decay by the
frosts of centuries. Soft grass and wandering leafage have rooted
themselves in the rents, but they are not suffered to grow in their own
wild and gentle way, for the place is in a sort inhabited; rotten
partitions are nailed across its corridors, and miserable rooms
contrived in its western wing; and here and there the weeds are
indolently torn down, leaving their haggard fibres to struggle again
into unwholesome growth when the spring next stirs them: and thus, in
contest between death and life, the unsightly heap is festering to its
fall.

Of its history little is recorded, and that little futile. That it once
belonged to the dukes of Ferrara, and was bought from them in the
sixteenth century, to be made a general receptacle for the goods of the
Turkish merchants, whence it is now generally known as the Fondaco, or
Fontico, de' Turchi, are facts just as important to the antiquary, as
that, in the year 1852, the municipality of Venice allowed its lower
story to be used for a "deposito di Tabacchi." Neither of this, nor of
any other remains of the period, can we know anything but what their own
stones will tell us.

Sec. IV. The reader will find in Appendix 11, written chiefly for the
traveller's benefit, an account of the situation and present state of
the other seven Byzantine palaces. Here I shall only give a general
account of the most interesting points in their architecture.

They all agree in being round-arched and incrusted with marble, but
there are only six in which the original disposition of the parts is
anywise traceable; namely, those distinguished in the Appendix as the
Fondaco de' Turchi, Casa Loredan, Caso Farsetti, Rio-Foscari House,
Terraced House, and Madonnetta House:[42] and these six agree farther in
having continuous arcades along their entire fronts from one angle to
the other, and in having their arcades divided, in each case, into a
centre and wings; both by greater size in the midmost arches, and by the
alternation of shafts in the centre, with pilasters, or with small
shafts, at the flanks.

Sec. V. So far as their structure can be traced, they agree also in
having tall and few arches in their lower stories, and shorter and more
numerous arches above: but it happens most unfortunately that in the
only two cases in which the second stories are left the ground floors
are modernized, and in the others where the sea stories are left the
second stories are mod