Strolling along the city on a silent and lonely December day, observing those well known places that will never cease to be admired for their beauty, we suddenly perceive something new in the still air: a sense of safety, as if we were inside one of our own home’s rooms, cosy and familiar. It is indeed the city’s protective structure, its utterly original urban connotation that fascinates us, with its never too big spaces, its never completely open views, so that everything results perceptible and checkable.

The facade of Palazzo Nani, the bell tower of S.Barnaba and the balanced buildings, arcades, calli (lanes) and bridges following each other; the water of the canals and the light of the campi and campielli (squares and little squares) allow to take those breaks which are necessary for the perception of the city never to be oppressive or coercive.

As we go on walking, dipping in such a delicate calmness, we reach an elegant building with a view on the Canal Grande, which hides just behind it an enchanting garden: Ca’Rezzonico. The recently restored cavana, the place where the gondola’s of the proprietors, the “paroni” were anchored, gives a view of ancient memories on the water, water that is entrance to a canal which is unique in the world. The ballroom, the impressive staircase, and the beautiful rooms following each other at the first and second floor would be by themselves a breathtaking museal route: the marble ornamental panels of the doors in the “portego”, the main hall in every floor of the Venetian palaces, and the two statues of Alessandro Vittoria also at the “piano nobile”, notwithstanding the two gorgeous Murano chandeliers, remind us of the attentiveness for beauty which made Venice centre of international interest already two centuries ago; the refinement of paintings, frescoes and furniture make of the “Museo del 700 veneziano”, the museum of the 18th century in Venice, a place of unforgettable attraction. At the third floor, when we expect to be at the end of our visit, satisfied and grateful for the views of Canaletto, the frescoes of Tiepolo and Giambattista Crosato and the miniatures of Rosalba Carriera, we remained enchanted and amazed: right after having walked through a room with a typically Venetian marble floor, we suddenly see in front of us a calle, paved with a herring-bone pattern brick floor, a calle with a real shop, with real shop-windows and signboard.

The first shop-window looks onto the oldest part of the pharmacy : it is possible to see a store of seventeenth century’s majolica pharmacy jars of local production, nicely arranged on various rows of shelves; those albarellos of different sizes are in white majolica with blue floral patterns, and are disposed on a really well preserved eighteenth century’s piece of furniture. Such a rich store confirms the fact that Venice was an important place of production of medicins, herbs and drugs, destined both for local consumption and for commerce with other countries, but reserved to the privileged who could afford the treatments of the “speziale”, the chemist.

Looking around in the laboratory, you can see ampoules and alembics, distillers and flasks, a whole collection of Murano’s glass works used by the chemist for his countless remedies, like the “gomma edera”, a product of ivy, or the “mirabola citrini”, “l’acqua di viole”, violet water, or the “estratto di cardo”, thistle extract, up to the uttermost secret and prodigious “theriac”. Venice was particularly renown for the ability of its chemists in preparing this compound made of around fifty substances, composed by herbs, viper meat and extracts, for which the viper was captured following a really complex and effective rite against all kinds of poisoning; there were a great many receipts, more or less secret, used to prepare ointments and syrups which were sold at very high prices, even though often the chief substances were quite poor, such as for instance the Galenic medicine made of old shoes’dust, a wonderful remedy against burns and scalds. In the last shop-window you can see a marvellous wooden store, now brought back to the original splendour, that hosts an important group of multicoloured majolicas from the Venetian plant of the brothers Geminiano and Francesco Cozzi. That gives evidence of how, in the first years of the eighteenth century, the chemist who was at that time owner of the pharmacy called “Ai do San Marchi” and originarily situated in the S.Agostin area, in the S.Croce district, had requested a huge number of jars, jugs, albarellos and pillolari to embellish his shop. The most famous Venetian potter had been called to make the garden pottery, and he moved it with great care, enclosed in baskets, on one of the many row-boats that went across the lagoon, leaving from ‘quel di Cannaregio’, the Cannaregio area, probably from the S.Alvise area, where the firm is supposed to have been, that is to say in a scarcely inhabited area, out-of-the-way enough to ward off the danger that the fire of the ovens represented for such a fragile city, built on the water.

That trip was not the one or only trip for those jars, indeed the whole pharmacy was then acquired by the Musei Civici Veneziani and put back in the spaces of Ca’ Rezzonico. In 1931 the mansion was bought by a private citizen, the baron Lionello Hirshell de Minerbi, and this acquisition was followed by many others, thus assuring to the city an heritage as evidence of Venice’s cultural vivacity.