1423
The pact
The pact of 1423
In 1423 Matteo Armano, a childless silk merchant, left his houses to a charitable trust in the care of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. In his will he wrote a clause that reads like bookkeeping and is in fact a promise: half of all rents must go to the upkeep of the buildings. It is because of that single line that the palazzo has crossed six centuries.
The promise was tested. In 1619 surveyors described walls “that inspire the greatest fear”; in 1768 the façade over the rio was out of plumb and the tenants had to leave; in the 1960s the masonry towards the water was in collapse. Each time someone paid, repaired, raised it again. Each time the house stood.
Meanwhile Venice lived here: silk merchants, whose trade tied the city to the East along the routes another Venetian, Marco Polo, had travelled and described; the Valier for over seventy years; then the Capellis, who gave the calle the name that is still the palazzo’s address. Low in the outer walls you can still make out the small yellowish bricks of the altinelle — Roman bricks brought from the demolition of ancient Altino, the very material with which Venice was founded: older, in fact, than the building that holds them.
The most recent restoration is ours: room by room, with the façade on the rio replastered in lime and natural earth pigments, as the heritage office prescribed. Matteo Armano’s clause is no longer a legal obligation, but it still holds: every stay here helps keep the house standing for those who come after. For a few nights, the pact passes into your hands.
