The Ringling

John Ringling and his brothers built the most famous circus in the world, and by the 1920s John had also grown rich in railroads, oil, and Florida land during the state's roaring boom. He and Mable settled on Sarasota, a modest Gulf Coast town, as their winter retreat, and John's influence helped put it on the map, most dramatically by moving the circus's winter quarters there, which drew crowds and gave the town its enduring circus identity.

The couple embarked on building a grand estate on the bay, hiring architects and artisans and buying art across Europe. The 1929 crash and the death of Mable that same year shattered much of John's fortune and his health, and he spent his final years fighting to hold on to his properties. When he died in 1936 he left the estate and its art collection to the state of Florida, ensuring the public would inherit what the circus had built.

The centerpiece of the estate is Ca' d'Zan, which means House of John in the Venetian dialect. Completed in the mid-1920s, it is a fantasy of Venetian Gothic architecture rising from the edge of Sarasota Bay, its terraces and tower and colored glass inspired by the palaces the Ringlings admired along the Grand Canal. Mable was deeply involved in its design, and the house reflects the couple's love of Venice and their theatrical taste.

Inside, the mansion is a showcase of the Jazz Age at full flourish, with a soaring court, imported furnishings, and rooms decorated to impress. It fell into disrepair after the Ringlings' time and was later painstakingly restored to its original splendor, so visitors today see the rose-and-gold palace much as it looked when the circus king entertained on the bay.

John Ringling assembled a remarkable collection of European art at a time when American tastes ran elsewhere, buying Old Master paintings, especially large Baroque canvases, at prices that later looked like bargains. Among his prizes are monumental works by Peter Paul Rubens and paintings by other great European masters, displayed in a pink Italian Renaissance-style palazzo built around a garden courtyard filled with copies of classical sculpture.

The museum has grown well beyond John's original collection to include galleries of Asian art, contemporary work, and rotating exhibitions, and it now serves as the official state art museum of Florida under the stewardship of Florida State University. For a town its size, Sarasota's access to such a collection is extraordinary, and it remains the intellectual heart of the estate.

No visit to the Ringling would be complete without its Circus Museum, which celebrates the traveling show that made the family's name. Vintage circus wagons, costumes, posters, and equipment tell the story of the golden age of the American circus, when the arrival of the train in town was a whole community's biggest event of the year.

The showstopper is the Howard Bros. Circus model, a miniature re-creation of an entire traveling circus at astonishing scale, built by one man over decades. It shows the big top, the sideshows, the menagerie, the dining tents, the rail cars, and thousands of tiny figures, capturing the enormous logistical feat of moving a circus city from town to town. It brings the vanished world of the tented circus vividly back to life.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.