The five-bedroom piano nobile, or main floor, with its 18-foot ceilings, rare antique pieces and Deco extravagances (such as a gold-tiled bathroom with a swan motif) faces the Grand Canal on one side, an Italian garden on the other.

FORBES: The timeless world of the Venetian aristocracy lives on.

"The story of Amundsen and Nobile is not very well known... lots of people know about the South Pole, but not very many people know what happened after that, " said Daniel Petry, the chief executive of Context TV, who is also joining the expedition.

BBC: Hunt on for explorer's lost plane

Roberto Scandiuzzi, a basso nobile who has made the 1881 role of the outraged father Jacopo Fiesco very much his own, was fascinated to see the earlier version staged, but would not wish to sing it because of the higher tessitura of the original scoring, and the less sympathetic emphasis of the characterisation.

ECONOMIST: Putting on anything and everything by Verdi