The Palazzo Ascensione, a neoclassical building dating from the first half of the 19th century, stands in front of the Napoleonic Wing at the back of St. Mark’s Square. It is located at the beginning of one of Venice’s liveliest streets, Via XXII Marzo. Built by architects Lorenzo Santi and Alvise Pigazzi in 1838, it originally housed the Ascensione Guards, hence the name. The building has three floors connected by a wide staircase with a coffered soffit and faux-marble decoration on the walls, topped by an early 20th-century skylight whose lantern is decorated with an Art Nouveau motif band. The mezzanine floor is double-height with a large central hall, punctuated by Doric order columns. The second floor is also double in height with a central hall and large glass surfaces. The second-floor mezzanine has rooms dedicated to office use and storage and archives, owned by the State Public Property Office. The main facade has four pilasters in the center framing the gabled windows of the main floor, while on the ground floor faux ashlar plasterwork is interrupted by four marble bas-relief plaques commemorating the Neapolitan officers who defended Venice in 1848.

The restoration work substantially aimed at preserving the existing finishes, with maintenance work on the floors, wall surfaces, doors, frames, and decorative elements such as the band with marmorino present on the walls of the stairwell, the decoration with paintings of the skylight, and the plaster stucco of the first floor whose original color had been lost. The condition of the staircases and the presence of an obvious crack on the central bearing wall of the second floor required a targeted structural consolidation intervention designed with a view to ensuring complete reversibility.

Maintaining the intended use as offices, the project respected the existing finishes of the perimeter walls (affecting the prevalence of the rooms, excluding those with stucco and decorations) and included partition walls for electrical and other systems, air conditioning, insulation and new windows and doors. The use of such partition walls produces the system of the “box in the box” independent of the existing building, ensuring integrity and reversibility. The most suitable solutions for optimizing energy efficiency and achieving environmental comfort were implemented, including a new air conditioning system. From an electrical point of view, specialized equipment was provided for flexible use of the rooms. The work also involved the construction of the new accessible bathrooms in an area of the building which was already being used for such services.