Country Life, 14th March 2002
Make Venice my home
Jeremy Musson
...For a few dreamy days in November, we took the Casa dell'Albero in the San Marco district, through Venetian Apartments, one of the leading specialists in renting out private apartments, many in old palaces. The house is owned by an ebullient and cultured English couple, Sir Reresby and Lady Sitwell, who have furnished it beautifully with Italian painted furniture from the family's Tuscan castle, Montegufoni, which is described so vividly in Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand. November is a good month if you are lucky with the weather, as we were - as James Lees-Milne writes in Venetian Evenings (1988): 'Few people, I think, would dispute that Venice is an autumnal, a sunset city . . . best seen in late afternoon just before twilight.'
Casa dell'Albero is not a palace, and was probably a merchant's house, but the singular elegance of its furniture makes it very much a palace in miniature. The house has a large, marble-floored drawing room, which has three windows overlooking one of the smaller canals, which is approached from the Grand Canal. Every window looks out onto a view like a sketch from a Ruskin notebook, and there are three bedrooms with elaborate beds, as well as a little overflow room under the eaves...
