The tangible sign of Este's surrender to Venice is the privatization of the Castle: sold to a Venetian nobleman who turns it into his private garden, around a palace open to the center of the city.
Starting in 1570, after purchasing the castle area, the Venetian nobles Mocenigo begin the construction of the large palace, made up of two L-shaped bodies, symmetrically arranged on the urban front of the castle walls and aligned with the entrance to the medieval Castle Park.
The eastern wing, the one to the right of the access portal to today's public gardens of the Castle, was destroyed by a fire in the 1700s and the palace was abandoned, until the municipality's purchase of the entire Castle complex in 1887. Since then, the Palace and the Garden have hosted many national-level events.
Having regained “its” Castle, almost to mark a change in class, at the door of the Palace the City inaugurated in 1906 a monument to the "Bard of Democracy," Felice Cavallotti, the Garibaldian Mazzinian, rhetorician, and writer, founder of the historical extreme left, which later merged into the Radical Party, who had been killed a few years earlier in a duel with a conservative journalist.
The relationship between the Castle Walls and the Mocenigo Palace, barely perceptible both from the street and from within the Park, clearly shows how the ancient castrum that enclosed a small city has been reduced to a garden belonging to an important noble residence.
From the inner courtyard, it is clear that Palazzo Mocenigo is not a villa: the noble severity of the sixteenth-century Palace indicates the urban imprint and not that of a vacation home that the Mocenigo family wishes to give to their stay in Este, qualifying the city with which they are in close contact.
The Palace is built on the medieval walls of the Carrarese Castle, which thus lose their purely defensive character and become a stylistic feature of the new architecture. Inside, three halls of the noble floor preserve seventeenth-century frescoes, with mythological and allegorical subjects within fake architectures, attributed to Giulio Carpioni or contemporary Emilian painters.
