How to Tour John Ringling's Ca' D' Zan
- 1). Choose which tour you would like. You can explore the first floor on your own or take a guided tour of the first and second floors. Either way you'll start outside on the eastern side of the house ogling the 61-foot-tall tower with its diamond-patterned tile work. There are also terra-cotta male and female nudes carved up there which supposedly resembled John and Mable and were a sort of great embarrassment for them.
- 2). Go in through the foyer and you'll notice the black and white checkerboard marble floors that are a trademark of this house. Beyond the archways is the baronial great hall, a two-and-a-half-story galleried space with a hooded fireplace, pipe organ and windows looking west onto Sarasota Bay. Between the house and the bay is the 200-foot-long terrace to which John Ringling once kept tethered a Venetian gondola and which is paved in marble laid in a hallucinatory zig-zag pattern.
- 3). Continue north from the foyer into the reception room, with the solarium beyond. The reception room seems almost like a staging area, preparing you for the ballroom to the west of it. The ballroom features a rosewood Steinway piano, walls covered with yellow brocade and a coffered ceiling painted with figures by Willy Pogany.
- 4). Walk south across the great hall and into the breakfast room, which includes a painting by Rosa Bonheur and green leather dining chairs. Take note of the cushions under each chairs--these were to prevent people at breakfast from getting cold feet from the marble floor. Go south through the great hall into the dining room, with walnut paneling, coffered ceiling and Italian Renaissance furnishings. Beyond the dining room is a hallway that leads to the service wing and the bar, a paneled room that was purchased and moved intact from a restaurant in St. Louis.
- 5). Take this hallway west, then north to the main staircase. At the top of the stairs, go left, left again, then right and you'll be on the gallery surrounding the great hall. On the north side of the gallery are four guest rooms. On the east side, over the front door, is the bedroom of Emily Ringling, John's second wife, to whom he did not stay married long. The furniture here is in gray lacquer.
- 6). Turn right, then left and you'll see Mable's bedroom with its massive ceiling beams and sandalwood furniture. To the right of it is John Ringling's long bedroom, with Empire-style furnishings an oval painting on the ceiling and three balconies. Northwest of the bedroom is a private office, while southeast of it is a bathroom with a barber chair and a tub carved from a single block of marble.Make sure before you leave to visit the grounds, the Ringling Museum of Art, the eighteenth-century Italian theater pavilion and the graves of John and Mable.
