The Secret Itineraries: the rooms no ordinary ticket opens

The public rooms of the Doge’s Palace were built to be seen: enormous, gilded, hung with paintings the size of walls. The rooms behind them were built to work in, and they are the opposite — low, wood-panelled, and small enough that two people fill them.

The chancellery. Cabinets of documents, each drawer marked with the name of a state the Republic dealt with. It is a filing system, and it is one of the most striking things in Venice, because it makes the abstraction concrete: this was an administration, and it kept paperwork.

The interrogation room. Small, wooden, with a place for the accused and places for the three inquisitors. It is not a dungeon and there is nothing theatrical about it, which is exactly what makes it unsettling.

The Piombi. Up under the roof, directly beneath the lead sheets that give them their name. These were the cells for prisoners the Republic considered worth keeping close rather than in the damp cells at ground level. They are wooden boxes, and the temperature in them follows the roof.

Casanova’s escape. He was held in the Piombi, got out through the ceiling with a co-conspirator in 1756, crossed the roof, came down into the palace and walked out past a guard who assumed he had been locked in by mistake. The guide tells it in the room, which is the correct place to hear it.

Venice ran for a thousand years without a hereditary monarch, and the machinery that made that possible was elaborate, suspicious and almost entirely administrative. The doge was elected by a process so convoluted it took ten rounds of drawing lots and voting, and he was watched for the rest of his life.

The Council of Ten and the three State Inquisitors sat in the rooms this tour walks through. They dealt with anything touching the security of the Republic, they worked fast, and they worked quietly. The famous stone letterboxes around the city — the bocche di leone, lion’s mouths — took anonymous denunciations, though in practice unsigned accusations were generally discarded, which is a detail the tour is good on.

What makes the rooms worth seeing is the contrast a few metres away. On one side of a wall, the Great Council hall: fifty-three metres long, gilded, hung with the largest canvas painting in the world. On the other, a wooden office with a cabinet of files in it. The Republic was both of those things at once, and only one of them is on the postcard.