Museums for Families On Demand
DOGE’S PALACE
The Palace with a Tale to Tell
This interactive visit is designed for younger visitors, enabling them to discover the history and artistic wealth of the Palace. Divided into stages, it uses games, hidden clues, stories and legends to engage the participants, each of whom will have an activity book that they can take away with them and then use for follow-up work at home.
Length: 2 hours
Language: Italian, English, French , German, Spanish or Russian.
Recommended age for this activity: 7 to 14 years
A Book in Stone
This workshop is all about exploring the stories, crafts, plants and animals that are depicted in the massive book made up of the Palace’s sculpted medieval capitals. Including a visit to the museum, this workshop combines games requiring the participants to use their deductive skills with various other teaching-through-play activities. The aim is to enable them to understand the full content of these vivid and highly expressive carvings, before moving onto the workshop proper where they try to reconstruct one of the more beautiful capitals and then create a plaster cast which everyone then gets to keep.
Length: 2 hours 30 minutes
Language: Italian, English
Recommended age for this activity: 5 to 10 years
Understanding (and reconstructing) the Palace
With degrees of complexity suited to different levels of schoolchildren, this workshop is preceded by a visit to the Doge’s Palace that focuses in particular upon the fabric of the building and its history, upon the construction of an extraordinary architectural “appartus” which was not only the seat of government but also a “conveyor of messages” expressed in works of painting and sculpture. In the workshop, the students will, starting from an exploded-view diagram, create a real 3-D model of the Palace which they can then take home with them. The more skilled students can work not only on a model of the Palace but also on one of what, until the nineteenth century, was the Doge’s private chapel – that is, St. Mark’s Basilica itself (complete with bell-tower).
Length: 2 hours
Language: Italian, English
Recommended age for this activity: 8 to 14
The Lion Hunt
What better than a lion, the very symbol of Venice, to lead children on a more unusual trip around the Doge’s Palace. In this ‘lion hunt’ they must find various painted and sculpted depictions of the animal throughout the Palace, and “win” some items that, put together, will result in a lion-like surprise to take home.
Length: 2 hours
Language: Italian, English, French, German
Recommended age for this activity: 5 to 10 years