WHAT better address can there be than the Grand Canal in Venice? This apartment on the first floor - or piano nobile - of the Palazzo Minotto has a breathtaking view across to the Guggenheim museum, looking past the great dome of the Santa Maria della Salute church to the sparkling lagoon. The pretty pink façade has flame-headed medieval arches forming a delightful contrast with the portentous Classical front of the Palazzo Corner next door. The price is similarly impressive: €9 million (£6.7 million).

The thrill inside is to find not just a spacious apartment running to 640 sq m (6,890sq ft) but also a series of elegant state rooms virtually unaltered since the first half of the 18th century. The only later feature is a Pompeiian-style room of Napoleonic date with a painted vault. This is the best room in which to sleep, with windows thrown open to hear the gentle sound of water lapping against the walls below.

The seller, Madina Franchin, has let the apartment for the past three years to what she calls the “beautiful people, a group of four musicians who keep the house alive by performing operas”. When I arrived the apartment was prepared as a set for La Traviata. The music room, with wonderful stucco trophies of arms, armour and musical instruments, was to serve for Violetta's dramatic confrontation with a young nobleman, Alfredo Germont. In the gorgeous state bedroom, bedclothes were thrown back ready for Violetta to sing herself to death surrounded by the full panoply of Baroque illusion, coroneted coats of arms, playful cherubs and palm fronds.

Mrs Franchin now spends a lot of time in the US visiting her son, and needs a smaller flat in Venice. Her father bought the palace some 50 years ago; it had previously belonged to her mother's family. The palace has Byzantine origins, and for three centuries until 1804 was home to the Barbarigo family, two of whom, the brothers Marco and Agostino, served as Doge.

The entrance to the palazzo is two blocks from the Palazzo Gritti Hotel. You enter by way of a typical “water hall”, ascending a grand tunnel-vaulted flight of stone steps to the main salon. Usually these salons run from front to back looking out over both canal and courtyard. Here a splendid drawing room looks out over the Grand Canal from a Gothic stone balcony with carved cat-sized Venetian lions sitting on the balustrade. The Pompeiian Room to the east has a boxed-in glazed balcony where Mrs Franchin's mother sat happily all day in the winter sun watching the constant stream of gondolas, water buses, barges and motor launches.

The appeal of the apartment is that five of the rooms retain gorgeous stucco ceilings. There are frescoes attributed to Tiepolo (two of his paintings for the palace are now in the Ca' Rezzonico Museum) as well as exquisite low reliefs of mythological scenes. The backgrounds are painted in characteristic pale pinks and yellows. Here are all the delightful early 18th-century decorative flourishes: swirls of foliage, garlands of roses, parasols and trompe l'oeil ribbons and tassels. In the corner saloon an enchanting menagerie of Beatrix Potter animals has been added: tortoise, parrot, piglet, duck, squirrel, rabbit and duck are perched on ledges, and are so cleverly done you might think they were real.

There is a chapel hidden behind Baroque cupboard doors that can be used for weddings. Thoughout the apartment double doors are faced in lustrous veneers, and the rich red-brown terrazzo floors and marble thresholds are those cited in the household accounts in 1739.

Without question, the Palazzo Minotto is a glorious place in which to entertain, with the main rooms forming a circuit for guests to parade through. Gentle cleaning of the stucco would reveal still more of its original intense brilliance. Furnished with long, low sofas in smart Venetian fabric, this could be an immensely chic bolthole. The challenge is to install smart bathrooms in a sympathetic manner and to adapt the small servants' rooms as bedrooms for children and guests. I would move in immediately and start with large candlelit dinners.

Details: Knight Frank, 020-7629 8171

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