What surprised most foreign travellers to Italy was the emptiness of the great suites which lay behind the facades of most large palaces. Apart from the few splendid apartments on view, the palaces contained many undistinguished rooms and their contents could not compare with French furniture and the chic of Parisian styles, for which the Italians substituted tasteless extravagance. The pictures by Pietro Longhi of Venetian interiors conjure up the sparsely furnished rooms of many Italian rococo houses.