THE DELLA ROCCA-BAROZZI TOWER: A VENETIAN HOME THAT NEVER CHANGED HANDS

Step through the Trani Porta, the imposing northern gate of the Kastro, and one of the very first buildings inside the walls is a tower-house that has belonged, by most accounts, to the same family line for roughly eight centuries. Today it operates as the Venetian Museum of Naxos, but calling it simply a museum undersells what makes it genuinely unusual: this is not a historic building acquired, restored and reopened by an institution, but a private family home that has been quietly, continuously lived in since the earliest years of the Duchy of the Archipelago, and is now shared with visitors by the very descendants of the people who built it.

Built at the Very Beginning of the Duchy

Tradition dates the tower's construction to 1207, the same year Marco Sanudo conquered Naxos and established the Duchy of the Archipelago — placing this building among the very earliest surviving structures raised anywhere within the Kastro's walls. It was built for, and has long been associated with, the de la Roche family, later hellenised to Della Rocca, one of the noble Venetian households who arrived with Sanudo's conquest and were granted estates on the island as vassals of the new ducal administration. Unlike many of the feudal families whose Naxian fortunes rose and fell across the following centuries, the Della Rocca line kept its property through successive changes of ruler — Venetian, then Ottoman suzerainty, then the modern Greek state — and its descendants still live among the mansions of the Kastro today. Records specifically documenting the family's continuous possession of this particular tower date back at least as far as 1704, though the building itself, and the family's presence on Naxos, is considerably older still.

The double-barrelled name by which the tower and museum are now known reflects an intermarriage between two of the Kastro's most prominent noble lines: the Della Rocca family and the Barozzi family, another influential Venetian household whose own coat of arms can still be found carved into doorways and lintels elsewhere in the old town. The union of the two family names on this single building is, in effect, a small piece of Kastro heraldry made permanent in the property's own title.

Military Headquarters, Then Consulate

Beyond its role as a family residence, the tower is recorded as having served two distinct official functions across its long history: as a Venetian military headquarters during the period of Venetian rule, and, later, as a consulate during the subsequent centuries of Ottoman suzerainty over Naxos. That combination — a private noble residence doubling as a site of genuine administrative and diplomatic function — is a useful reminder of just how thoroughly interwoven the Kastro's grand houses were with the actual governance of the island, long after the Duchy's original political independence had formally ended.

From Family Home to Private Museum

The tower's transformation into a museum came at the initiative of the Della Rocca family itself, who converted their ancestral home into a folkloric museum and opened it to the public without external institutional backing. The museum operates entirely on its own admission proceeds, without government funding or support — a genuinely independent, family-run cultural institution in a way that sets it apart from Naxos's larger public museums. Today, the building and its collection belong to the Karavias family, direct descendants of the intertwined Della Rocca and Barozzi lines, who continue to maintain the tower, welcome visitors and, in the case of family member Nikos Karavias in particular, personally guide tours through the collection in what visitors regularly describe as a lively, engaging and distinctly personal style rather than a standard museum audio-guide experience.

A Museum You Actually Walk Through

What distinguishes a visit to the Della Rocca-Barozzi tower from most historic house museums is the sheer physical access it offers. Rather than viewing rooms from behind a rope barrier or through glass, visitors move directly through the tower's actual rooms, surrounded by centuries of accumulated furniture, clothing, household utensils and paintings that once furnished the everyday, lived reality of Naxos's Venetian nobility — an old map of Naxos dated 1485, family portraits, still-life paintings, inscribed stonework, and generations of domestic objects that together sketch out, room by room, what aristocratic life in the Kastro actually looked and felt like across several hundred years. Guided tours generally run around forty minutes and are offered in both English and Greek, giving visitors considerably more historical context and personal family narrative than the objects alone could provide.

A Living Cultural Venue, Not Just a Museum

Particularly through the summer season, the tower continues to function as an active cultural venue rather than a purely static collection. Its cellar and the adjoining courtyard, which opens onto sweeping views over Naxos Town's harbour, have long hosted classical music recitals, traditional violin concerts, art exhibitions and folkloric events, carrying on, in a much more intimate setting, the same spirit of cultural programming that the island's larger Naxos Festival brings to Bazeos Tower each summer. For visitors whose stay coincides with one of these events, an evening at the Della Rocca-Barozzi tower offers a rare chance to experience the Kastro not simply as a historical backdrop but as a still-functioning venue for exactly the kind of gathering its rooms were originally built to hold.

Visiting the Venetian Museum Today

The museum sits just inside the Kastro's Trani Porta, its main northern gate, making it one of the most easily found and accessible historic buildings within the old town, a short walk up from Naxos Town's harbour and market street. Given the site's private, family-run nature, opening hours and guided tour timings can vary by season, and it's worth confirming current details locally, whether by phone or in person, before planning a visit around a specific time. Because tours are personally guided rather than self-directed, arriving with a little time to spare, rather than rushing between other Kastro sights, tends to make for the more rewarding visit — this is a site built around a story told in person, not a plaque to be read quickly and moved past.

Nearby: The Rest of the Kastro's Heraldic World

The Della Rocca-Barozzi tower sits at the heart of the same dense cluster of Venetian-era sights covered elsewhere in this series' article on the Kastro of Naxos: the Catholic Cathedral and its family memorial stones, the Tower of Crispi close by, and the Archaeological Museum housed in the former Jesuit school, all reachable on foot within a few minutes. Carved coats of arms belonging to the Della Rocca and Barozzi families, along with those of the Sanudo, Crispi and Sommaripa lines, can still be spotted above doorways throughout the surrounding lanes — a useful thing to look out for immediately after a visit to the tower, since having just seen one noble family's home and belongings up close makes the wider heraldic landscape of the Kastro considerably easier to read.

Most of Naxos's historic buildings survive as carefully preserved ruins, or as institutions that have taken over a structure no family occupies anymore. The Della Rocca-Barozzi tower is something rarer: a genuinely continuous thread, stretching back eight centuries to the very founding of the Venetian Duchy, still held by descendants willing to open their own front door and walk visitors through it themselves. Few places on Naxos offer a more direct, unmediated conversation with the island's Venetian past than that.