A one-way route, and the things worth stopping for on it
What to see inside the Doge's Palace
The route runs in one direction with limited scope for doubling back, so knowing what is coming — and what is easy to walk straight past — makes a real difference. This is the walkthrough in order.
Book your Doge's Palace entry ↗Before you go in: the façade
Spend five minutes outside on the Piazzetta looking up. Read the building downward: solid marble wall, then the loggia of seventy-one columns with its band of quatrefoils, then the ground arcade. Then look at the two column capitals at the corners — they carry carved scenes, including the drunkenness of Noah at the corner nearest the bridge, positioned so that the Republic's own building offered a moral lesson to anyone approaching from the water.
The courtyard and the Giants' Staircase
The Scala dei Giganti, with Sansovino's colossal Mars and Neptune at the top representing Venetian dominion over land and sea. Doges were crowned on the landing. Marin Falier, the doge whose portrait was later painted out, was beheaded on the same steps.
The Golden Staircase
Look up. The Scala d'Oro's barrel vault is white stucco relief gilded with 24-carat gold, and the stucco work is at least as good as the gold. It was the route ambassadors took to their audience, and it was doing a job.
The Doge's Apartments
Restrained, domestic in scale, and easy to hurry through on the way to the state rooms. Worth slowing for: the chimneypieces, and the sense of how modestly the head of state actually lived. He furnished these rooms himself and his family had to empty them within days of his death.
The Anticollegio
A small waiting room where foreign delegations were parked before their audience, and — deliberately — one of the most spectacular rooms in the building. Four Tintorettos and Veronese's Rape of Europa. The Republic wanted ambassadors to spend their waiting time being impressed.
The Collegio and the Senate
The executive committee's room and the Senate chamber. Veronese's ceiling in the Collegio is among his finest work. In both rooms the message is the same and is worth reading rather than merely admiring: Venice as just, wise, divinely protected, the equal of any monarchy.
The Council of Ten and the lion's mouth
The room of the security committee that gave the Republic its reputation for opaque and effective repression. Somewhere on this stretch you will pass a Bocca di Leone, a carved marble slot for anonymous denunciations. It is small, easy to miss, and tells you more about how Venice was governed than any of the ceilings.
The armoury
Several rooms of weapons and armour, including pieces taken at Lepanto. Often walked through quickly. Worth a few minutes if only for the scale of the crossbows.
The Great Council chamber
The climax of the route and the reason to keep some energy back. Fifty-three metres long with no columns; up to two thousand patricians met here. Tintoretto's Paradise fills the end wall behind the throne. Give yourself time to stand still in the middle of it before moving on.
The black panel
Around the top of the Great Council chamber runs a frieze of portraits of the doges. One, on the north side, is a painted black veil with an inscription instead of a face: Marin Falier, doge in 1354, executed in 1355 for conspiring against the constitution. The Republic recorded the erasure rather than hiding it. It is the single most telling object in the palace and most visitors walk past it.
The Bridge of Sighs
You cross it, in both directions. Manage your expectations: it is a narrow enclosed corridor with two small stone-latticed windows, and the view of Venice through them is a sliver. The bridge is a thing to look at from outside, from the Ponte della Paglia — but walking through it is the pivot of the route, from government to imprisonment in about fifteen paces.
The New Prisons
Stone corridors and cells across the canal, with prisoners' graffiti still on the walls in places. Cool, dim and a very deliberate contrast with everything you have just walked through. This is the point of the one-way route.
What you will not see on the standard ticket
The Piombi cells under the lead roof, from which Casanova escaped in 1756; the Pozzi at water level; the torture chamber; and the administrative back rooms. All of those are on the separate Secret Itineraries guided tour, which is a different ticket and books out in advance.
On the way out
The ticket also covers the Correr, the Archaeological Museum and the Marciana Library at the far end of the square. If you have any appetite left, the Marciana's main hall is a twenty-minute walk and a very quiet twenty minutes.