Count Francesco da Mosto flings open the door to the grand central hall of his Venetian palace. Dappled by the fluid, playful light reflected from the canal below the vast leaded windows, a uniformed maid deals with sheaves of dead foliage from a small copse of indoor plants. The 18th- century plasterwork that adorns the walls under the original lofty beamed ceiling from the late 16th century stretches the 75ft length of the chamber, known as the portego.
“This is the children’s playroom,” da Mosto declares. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “family room”. As his three children — aged 9, 7 and 4 — whizz around on their little electric train engine, they can glance up at paintings showing the illustrious exploits of their forebears. The da Mostos have been a prominent Venetian family for 1,000 years, although Francesco’s grandfather, Andrea, acquired this palazzo in 1919. But he wasted no time in having the empty picture frames on the walls of the portego filled with copies of family pictures, including a 15th-century map of the voyages of Alvise da Mosto, who discovered the Cape Verde islands off the west of Africa.
It is easy to see why the producers of the sumptuous new series on Venice, which began on BBC2 last night and will run for the next three weeks, chose da Mosto as its presenter. The spirit of the city is in his DNA, and he inhabits it, and the palazzo, with ease and style. It’s a fabulously grand home — even though you approach the street door down a narrow alleyway hung with washing — but they’re not grand about it. He and his South African-born wife, Jane, an environmental scientist who has just published an analysis of the threats to Venice and the lagoon, live mainly in a jumble of antiques, comfortable modern furniture and Lego on a light-filled upper floor (“86 steps up — a nightmare for my wife, with three children”).
The elegant rooms off the portego are the domain of his mother and his father, a former journalist, and are adorned with photos of their grandchildren.
We wander from room to room, da Mosto, arms waving, cigarette on the go (a habit he does not forsake in front of the BBC’s cameras), twiddling with switches to activate the dim antique electric lighting and pouring out stories.
There’s the neoclassical dining room with its frescoes depicting the country house of the palazzo’s previous owners, the Baglioni family. He demonstrates with his cigarette lighter how flickering candlelight enhances the pictures, bringing details out from the shadows.
Then there’s the red salon. “My mother calls it the bishop’s room, I call it the divorce room” — on account of the allegorical frescoes by Guarana, who also worked on paintings in the Ca’ Rezzonico, now a museum, depicting the good and bad in marriage, and female vices and virtues.
It would take a team of experts weeks to compile an inventory of the palazzo’s treasures. Doors to secret staircases and passageways open to reveal hangings of rare Fortuny prints. Scores of copper cooking pots hang on the old chimney in one of the kitchens, dozens of pewter dishes adorn a passage wall, there are collections of prints depicting Venetian history (da Mostos in prominent roles), ornate 18th-century glass buttons and rare porcelain.
Da Mosto opens another door: “Here you have the church.” A tiny baroque chapel, with a ceiling fresco that contains a semi-concealed eye in a triangle — a Masonic symbol? “Perhaps. Sometimes we have a mass in here, but the church wouldn’t let us baptise our children here. They say you have to do it in the community.”
Not that that bothers the Count da Mosto. He once spent three weeks living in a fire station to make a documentary about Venice’s firefighters. When we go out to lunch at a local restaurant — although only a few minutes’ walk from the teeming market by the Grand Canal, the neighbourhood is virtually tourist-free — he seems to know almost everybody we encounter. As he stops to arrange dinner with the soignée wife of a chap he was at nursery school with, I realise, not without envy, that to be a Venetian is to live in the world’s most beautiful and sophisticated village. And in the series, da Mosto guides us through the streets, squares and canals of his native city with the same fond familiarity that he displays in his home.
In one picture in the portego, another ancestor — Francesco? Niccolo? For the moment, da Mosto can’t quite recall — sits surrounded by sacks of gold coins, paymaster of the Venetian army. “I envy him his money,” sighs his descendant. “There’s always work in progress, living in a place like this. It’s quite a responsibility.”
The plaster on the staircase from the ground-floor entrance, with its water gate on to a narrow canal, has to be replaced annually because of the damp. When he restores the flood-damaged storerooms down there and opens up the arches to the courtyard, that should reduce the damp.
“I have all the permits, now I can start,” he says. “And it seems I can have a 50% grant for the foundations, but getting grants is a long bureaucratic process. And while it is hard to maintain a house like this, surely there are others who need the money before us.”
To fund the work on his house, da Mosto carries out restoration projects on other grand Venetian homes. He is a qualified architect, and studied his own home for his student thesis. He was thrilled to confirm, after days among city archives, that the palazzo’s architect was Da Ponte, who designed the Rialto bridge.
But Palazzo Muti da Mosto will remain a work in progress.
On the floor below the portego is da Mosto’s enormous study, “the place I feel best”. Cluttered doesn’t begin to describe it. The shelves are crammed with books on architecture and videos from his days as a film-maker. His iMac fights for space on a heavy antique table and his drawing board is balanced on a bar-football table. Carnival masks, tide tables for the lagoon and mementos from travels in Africa cover the walls.
In the adjoining kitchen (by now I’ve lost count of how many kitchens there are) he is having a bash at restoring the blue-and-green marmorino (a plaster made with marble dust) on the walls to its original paler shades. “It would be nice to restore everything” — he points out the soot-blackened hole in the wall he knocked out so he could use the hearth behind it one chilly winter — “but you’d have to clear the room completely.”
That seems unlikely to happen. But when you have such a weight of family history behind you, you obviously operate in a more relaxed time frame. After all, as he says of the palazzo, “I didn’t do anything to have it. I was born here. Now I’m looking after it.”
But there’s no rush. “If my father hasn’t done it, and I don’t, maybe one of my children will.”
Venice for British buyers
Venice is no longer the preserve of the wealthy overseas buyer, says Anne-Marie Doyle of Venetian Apartments. A development of new flats on the island of Giudecca has attracted more than 100 British buyers with prices about half of those in central Venice. Prices start at about £400,000 for a decent two-bedder in the centre.
British buyers prefer not to take on restoration projects. Most buy to let and can obtain euro mortgages at rates starting at about 3.6%. At the top of the market, Venetian Apartments is selling Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel for £11m. 020 8878 1130, www.venice-sales.com
Venice continues on Saturday on BBC2. Francesco’s Venice, by Francesco da Mosto, is published by BBC Books, £25
