The Dreamer
In 2025, with Wonder Booster, we embraced wonder as a catalyst, expanding our gaze beyond the ordinary. Now we channel it strategically—into commitment and shared responsibility. Forget rigid protocols: cultivate a mindset open to the unexpected, the other. Transform wonder into meaningful perspective. Our duties reach beyond preservation to the next generation, who will shape tomorrow. Listen to off-screen voices—the Foundation’s visitors seeking self-recognition, reinvention—and the city’s silent questions, brimming with alternative futures, unique ideas, limitless creativity.
Joseph Brodsky, in Watermark on Venice: “A tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one’s retina, a tear is an acknowledgement of the retina’s… failure to retain beauty.” Venice overwhelms with unrestrainable beauty—radiant or subdued, crashing like waves. It wins eternal admiration. “One is what one looks at”, Brodsky adds. “For in dreams, as the poet said, begin responsibilities.”
Yeats’s phrase sparked Delmore Schwartz’s story—a paradox where dreams educate the imagination, spurring ethical life for the self and others. Dreams mirror actions and evasions, revealing position. Ignoring them is as irresponsible as dodging questions. Daydreams propel futures, demanding we weigh the consequences. They insist on reality, binding us to the world and relationships. Responsibility encompasses dreams themselves. Imagination isn’t a luxury—it’s a force, restrained amid wonder, a mission to conceive worlds and avoid catastrophes.
Giovanni Querini Stampalia is the dreamer: heir to a family ignited by art’s fire, science’s spark, vast libraries, fencing’s steel poetry, thundering horses. Unmarried, he gave it all—palace, collections, a midnight-open library for “useful studies,” free to everyone. A radical hack against locked-up knowledge.
His sister Caterina, the feminine counterpoint: poised passion, wed to cultured shadows, fueling salons with illuminated grace. Masculine thunder meets silken glow—their duet redefines legacy.
The Dreamer exhibition—which opens on May 5—is conceived as a series of cinematic sets or stages: entry ignites family obsessions; the library pulses with late-night wisdom; stables clash hoof and blade; the finale unpacks the 1869 will’s eternal gift. Velvet drapes, gaslit flickers, war drums, horse whinnies touch the scars of an era. History not on shelves, but alive: What will you donate to tomorrow?
The poet’s insight is vital: responsibility precedes action, words, will—surfacing in raw desires. Life is a dream, dreams are political, ethical sources of shared possibilities. Great narratives turn on dreams from private longing to “I have a dream.” They call, seduce, and demand vigilance. What world do we want? No vision without dreams, no dreams without commitment, no commitment without the tear for beauty greater than us. No dreams without responsible dreamers.
Cristiana Collu
Director of Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Visite guidate in Querini
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The 16th-century façade of Palazzo Querini with ‘The Material of the Ornament’,
a neon installation by Joseph Kosuth, 1997
“‘The Querini has the power to make your head spin. It is not a library. It is not a museum. It is a vortex.
Paintings and antique books. Architecture from the past and present. Contemporary art. Archive funds and photographic collections. All this is layered in a multidimensional, non-Euclidean hyper-object. The centuries and the staircases, the cubic metres and the stories collide.
A spatial-temporal capsule with a limitless capacity to inspire.’ “
Tiziano Scarpa, writer
Querini in versi. Cinque poeti esplorano la Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2020
An aspiration that goes beyond time
In his last will and testament of 1868, Giovanni Querini Stampalia founded an institution with the aim of ‘promoting the cult of good studies and useful subjects’. This remains the Fondazione’s mission: to be a place of research and learning, of meeting and relating, of personal growth and the spread of knowledge.
When it all began
‘My library, gallery, medal collection and art objects housed in my palace at San Zaccaria will be of public use’.
The year is 1868. Count Giovanni’s last will and testament signals the birth of the Fondazione, which was established the following year, in 1869: a visionary project that looked to the future.
Read more
Life of Count Giovanni
History of the Querini family
History of the Palazzo
History of the Library
History of the House Museum
History of the architectural interventions
Our network
The Querini Stampalia is the among the oldest cultural foundations in Italy.
Its importance is acknowledged by a vast network of public and private entities: the State, the Veneto Regional Government and Venice City Council above all, but also universities, national and international organisations, associations and companies.
The Fondazione organises projects and activities with these entities, which are growing in the number, variety and wealth of relationships.
