Palazzo Fortuny... Oh, My Goodness. (Honor)

I can't believe I almost didn't discover this extraordinary place.
I spent a few hours rambling through the cavernous rooms of this very ecclectic and eccentric collection of art and artefacts from ancient times to the present. Everything jumbled in together in the most wonderful way. Walls draped with exquisite silk and velvet brocade, hand-painted silk light shades two metres across and looking like something out of the Arabian nights... so deliciously exotic and strange. Downstairs, a gallery as dark as an old Venetian church, with spotlights illuminating a collection of works on a theme of transition between worlds... heavy timber beams across the  ceiling, water lapping under the door and into the stairwell from the canal. I felt like I'd stumbled on the home of a mad and magical prince. I sat on one of the enormous, becushioned couches and drew for ages.

I had to colour it when I came back to my apartment - my momentum and enchantment was such that it was inevitable, but on reflection, I think I preferred the simple graphite drawing made in situ. I may work at it yet, to bring back some of its detail and warmth.
Still, the exercise prolonged my bewitched state well into my very last night in Venice, and I can now head homeward as full to the brim with wonder as I felt on my first day.