FONDAZIONE LABIA

This guide to Fondazione Labia in Cape Town opens on Muizenberg beach in 1919, with a young woman named Heather Price standing up on a surfboard, and follows Count Natale Labia, Italy's first minister to South Africa, who decided a decade later that this stretch of coast deserved a Venetian palace of its own. It traces how decorator Angelo Zaniol recreated a corner of Venice's Palazzo Labia on the beach road, with marble floors, gilded ceilings and imported glass, on land that had once held an old gun battery guarding the bay. Look from the galleries toward Main Road, where evening dress and sunburned surfers once shared the same view.