In 2023, Save Venice spearheaded the successful pilot program of conservation fieldwork by the IVBC Restoration School to restore 18th-century stucco and frescoes at Venice’s Music Conservatory in Palazzo Pisani.

Save Venice continued its support by funding a 2024 full-year program of stucco and marmorino conservation in three rooms that house the Music Conservatory’s museum of musical instruments and the adjacent staircase–located in the mezzanine level of the south-east wing of Palazzo Pisani.

The three rooms that today house the Museum of Musical Instruments of Venice’s Music Conservatory were once used as the apartment of Alvise and Francesco Pisani’s mother, who resided in the palazzo in the late 18th century while her sons were serving as ambassadors abroad.

At the beginning of the 19th century these rooms were used as the headquarters of the Deputazione della Storia Patria, and by the 1940s became classrooms of the Conservatory.

The elaborate stucco decoration likely dates to around 1775 and could possibly be the work of notable plasterers Giuseppe Ferrari and Francesco and Zuanne Re. The first room off of the staircase, called the “Dressing Room of Apollo,” boasts the most lavish decoration of the four rooms.

Throughout 2024, conservators from Venice’s IVBC restoration school led the students and recent graduates in the fieldwork treatment of the stuccowork and marmorino decoration in the four rooms and adjacent staircase. They addressed several condition problems including the removal of disfiguring heavy overpainting and unsuitable materials that had been applied during previous interventions, while they also verified the structural stability of the decoration, stabilized and integrated cracks, and removed surface dirt and grime, before integrating small decorative losses.