Ca' Pesaro - Museo Orientale

Ca' Pesaro - Museo Orientale review Rate it

If Japanese art and weaponry of the Edo period (1600-1868) are your thing, you'll love this eclectic collection, put together by Count Enrico di Borbone - a nephew of Louis XVIII - in the course of a round-the-world voyage between 1887 and 1890. After the count's death, the collection was sold off to an Austrian antique merchant; it bounced back to Venice after World War I as reparations.

The collection features parade armour, dolls, decorative saddles and case upon case of curved samurai swords forged by smiths who had to perform a ritual act of purification before putting their irons in the fire. There is also a dwarf-sized lady's gilded litter, and lacquered picnic cases that prove that the Japanese obsession with compactness indeed pre-dates the Sony Walkman.