The fall of the Venetian Republic had, among many others, the bitter consequence of shutting down the Public Statuary, which had been the pride of the city for over two hundred years, promoted at the end of the sixteenth century by the Patriarch of Aquileia, Giovanni Grimani, who wanted to create a first major public museum in Venice with his donation of more than two hundred Greek and Roman sculptures. However, the enlightened mind of a Statuary custodian, the young Anton Maria Zanetti, produced in 1736 a handwritten inventory of the Statuary that also included a detailed drawing of the four walls and the large statues placed in the centre. Zanetti's drawings reproduce each sculpture with great accuracy and are so accurate that, as early as 1997, it was possible to reconstruct the two shorter walls for an exhibit, rearranging the works in their original place. A few years later, it became possible to recover the image of the entire hall, albeit virtually, as it appeared between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth century. The impact of the virtual reconstruction gives credit to the synergy that occurred between current technologies and scientific research and allows one to go back over the many centuries of one of the most successful and admired stories of the Serenissima.