Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo

This guide to Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo in Venice follows a hard-up German lithographer named Wilhelm Tempel, who climbed the tower's eighty spiral steps on a spring night in 1859 with a small homemade telescope under his arm. It traces the staircase itself, the bovolo or snail the Contarini family built in 1499 purely to show off, winding counterclockwise past open arches to a rooftop terrace over the city. From that terrace, self-taught and still unknown, Tempel pointed his telescope at the Pleiades.