Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Fifteen minutes north of St Mark’s Square, Venice, a large stone plaque set into a 4-metre wall trumpets “Casa di Tiziano”: the great Renaissance artist Titian lived here for 46 years until his death in 1576. We’re trying to buy the laundry house. It may have been Titian’s gilding workshop. We will use it as a summer house and have dinners in the gardenThe garden behind the wall is a beautifully designed 40m x 20m plot with a berceau — or arched trellis — of sweetly scented wisteria and Trachelospermum leading to the modest palazzo where the glamorous owners, interior designer and former model Julia Panama, and internet entrepreneur Claude Buchert, have lived since 2001.Muted glass lamps hang inside the berceau, illuminating white Busy Lizzie, variegated hosta and euonymus below. Acanthus, clematis and pale green heuchera complete subtle planting framed by the Venetian brick walls. A stone relief of Titian is set into the herringbone arch over the great wooden door to the street outside. On one side of the lawn, a bust stares out between two pillars. “I don’t know who he is but we call him Hercules,” says Panama.Titian’s prodigious output (some estimates have it as high as 600 artworks), much of it vast pieces, makes it unlikely that he had much time for pottering in the garden or even gazing across to his birthplace, the Dolomites village of Pieve di Cadore, 70 miles away. In his time the garden was larger, reaching down to the now-extended waterfront where guests would have arrived by gondola. Today neither lagoon nor canal, let alone Pieve di Cadore, is visible from the garden, and guests arrive by foot. The waterfront shifted when land was reclaimed to create the Fondamenta Nuove, where vaporettos, Venice’s water buses, head off to islands in the lagoon.When Panama and Buchert moved here the soil was contaminated by salt, as many Venetian gardens are. They replaced a metre of soil. More recently, they added a 500-litre tank to collect rainwater, which lasts about two weeks during dry spells. Their next project is to expand.“We’re trying to buy the laundry house, and some rooms on the bottom of the chopped-up palazzo,’’ says Panama of the brick laundry house bordering their garden. “It may have been Titian’s gilding workshop. We will use it as a summer house and have dinners in the garden.”At the centre of the garden is a pool of green. This is a dichondra lawn, popular in the hotter parts of the US and mainland Europe. It feels wonderfully soft underfoot. “Dichondra doesn’t take heavy traffic and the shady bits suffer in winter. We sometimes have to reseed areas in spring, and we mow it every two or three weeks to make it grow better,” says Panama.The dichondra completes this escape from the street outside, where tourists crowd to read the plaques about Titian and try, unsuccessfully, to see inside: Panama and Buchert do not open to the public.Alternative delights for Titian fans are close by, however, and include the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where Titian was laid to rest after dying from the plague. This is where his celebrated Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro hangs, a reminder of his wife Cecilia, who died in childbirth in 1530, only a few years after Titian used her as the model for his Virgin.Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
