While Luisa called Palazzo Venier dei Leoni home for fourteen years,
Doris Castlerosse’s possession of the property was brief. During World
War I, Luisa’s house had been looted of its remaining treasures, yet out-
side, the ivy-covered walls and overgrown garden remained magical,
offering Doris Castlerosse the sanctuary she needed after decades of so-
cial climbing. Born in 1900 in South London, Jessie Doris Delevingne
was not a Venetian grande dame but the daughter of a tradesman. She
had a conventional middle-class upbringing that she wanted to escape,
and her looks were her passport. Mackrell writes that Doris bravely re-
jected the standards of the age, “refusing to accept the social, sexual
and economic dominance of men.” With her beauty and lithe figure,
she became a professional mistress of the English upper class, buying
properties, clothes, and jewels before marrying Valentine Castlerosse, a
boisterous and eccentric playboy viscount. While they loved each other
and Doris enjoyed the privileges and steady income of her new life as a
viscountess, it was a violent, tumultuous marriage. After her divorce, she
left England, believing that “a promiscuous woman of a certain age was
beginning to verge on vulgarity.”
To take control of her social career, in 1936 Doris set her sights on
succeeding Luisa Casati as one of Venice’s more notable hostesses. Com-
pleted in 1938, Doris’s palazzo was a smarter, more contemporary ver-
sion of Casati’s former house with the addition of six new bedrooms,
central heating, and Venetian marble throughout. Doris, who had lived
off the largesse of her friends, now hosted royalty, English society, and
Hollywood celebrities in her new fiefdom. Yet her freedom and indepen-
dence at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni were short-lived. During World War
II, when Italy sided with Germany, Mackrell states, “Her fledgling career
as a society hostess had been summarily terminated,” and her palazzo
had become completely inaccessible to her. During the war the property
was taken over by three successive armies: the Italian, German, and Al-
lied forces. The interior was vandalized, the walls covered in graffiti, the
furniture burned as firewood, and the garden trampled to mud.
In 1946, the art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim was looking
to reset the course of her life. After two failed marriages and a string of
unhappy love affairs, she could no longer be happy in competitive New
York City, where friends envious of her inherited fortune were counting
up her failures. As Luisa and Doris had before her, she hoped to find
consolation at the palazzo. According to Mackrell, she came to Venice
for solace, “drawn to the lapping canal waters, the large skies, and the
