Between Campo San Samuele (a Venetian square) and the Grand Canal stands the last great patrician palace built before the fall of the Serenissima (the Republic of Venice): Palazzo Grassi, the massive Neoclassical pile that the extremely rich Bolognese Grassi family - who had come by way of Chioggia, where they lived from 1230, and were enrolled in the patriciate in 1718 after donating sixty thousand ducats for the Morea war - had Giorgio Massari erect in the mid-18th century: a monument to Venetian wealth in the Republic’s very sunset, built between 1748 and 1772 on the last great empty lot left on the waterway.