Just before arriving at the Rialto, you have to the left, in ascending the Canal, the Dario Palace, Gothic style; the Venier Palace, which reveals itself by one corner with its ornaments, its precious marbles and its medalions, Lombard style; the Fine-Arts, classic façade by the side of the ancient School of Charity and surmounted by a figure of Venice riding on a lion; the Contarini Palace, of Scamozzi’s architecture; the Rezzonico Palace, with three orders superimposed; the triple Giustiniani Palace, in the taste of the Middle Ages, inhabited by Signor Natale Schiavoni, a descendant of the celebrated painter Schiavoni, who has a picture-gallery and a beautiful daughter, the living reproduction of a picture painted by her ancestor; the Foscari Palace, recognizable by its lower door, its two rows of little columns supporting the ogives and the trefoils, where formerly lived those sovereigns who visited Venice, and now abandoned; the Balbi Palace, from the balcony of which the princes leaned to watch the regatta which took place on the Grand Canal with so much pomp and brilliancy during the heyday of the Republic; the Pisani Palace, in the German style of the beginning of the Fifteenth Century; and the Tiepolo Palace, quite smart and relatively modern, with its two elegant pyramids. To the right, very near the European Hotel, there stands between two large buildings a delicious little palace, composed of a window and a balcony; but what a window and what a balcony! a lace-work of stone: scrolls, guilloches, and open-work that one would not believe it possible to execute except by a cutting-machine and a piece of paper. I regretted that I did not have 25,000 francs about me to buy it, for that is all they asked. A little farther, still ascending, you find the Palace Corner della Cà Grande, which dates from 1532, one of Sansovino’s best; Grassi, to-day the Emperor’s inn, the marble stairway of which is garnished with handsome orange trees in pots; Corner-Spinelli, whose marble base is surrounded by a double fretwork of fine effect and which is to-day the Post Office; and Farsetti, with its columned peristyle and its long gallery with little columns occupying all the façade, where the municipality is lodged. We could say, as Don Ruy-Gomez da Silva says to Charles V. in _Hernani_, when he shows him the portraits of his ancestors: “_J’en passe, et des meilleurs._” We ask, however, attention for the Loredan Palace and the ancient dwelling of Enrico Dandolo, the conqueror of Constantinople. Between these palaces there are some worthy houses, whose chimneys in the form of turbans, towers, and vases of flowers, break the great lines of architecture very appropriately.