The great baroque church at the entrance to the Grand Canal, built between 1631 and 1687 as a votive offering to the Virgin Mary following the devastating plague of 1630 that killed approximately one-third of Venice's population. Designed by Baldassare Longhena when he was just 32, the church's octagonal plan surmounted by a massive dome and flanked by a smaller secondary dome creates one of the most recognisable silhouettes in European architecture -- the defining element of Venice's waterfront.....

The national library of Venice, housed in Jacopo Sansovino's masterwork of Renaissance architecture on the Piazzetta San Marco facing the Doge's Palace. The building, constructed between 1537 and 1588, was described by Andrea Palladio as the most ornate and richest building since antiquity -- its two-storey arcade of Doric and Ionic orders, encrusted with sculptural decoration, establishing the classical architectural vocabulary that would define the Piazzetta for centuries. The library was fou.....

A garden labyrinth on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in the Venetian lagoon, created in 2011 as a tribute to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and other works explored labyrinths as metaphors for time, infinity, and the structure of narrative. The labyrinth was designed by Randoll Coate, a British hedge-maze designer, and occupies an area within the grounds of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island. The maze is planted in boxwood.....

An enclosed limestone bridge spanning the Rio di Palazzo connecting the Doge's Palace to the New Prisons, built in 1600 to an Antonio Contino design in the baroque style. The bridge's English name, coined by Lord Byron in the nineteenth century, refers to the sighs of condemned prisoners who supposedly took a last look at Venice through its small stone-grilled windows before descending into their cells. The reality of Venetian justice was more prosaic, but the romantic legend has made this one o.....

Venice's international gallery of modern and contemporary art, housed in a monumental baroque palazzo on the Grand Canal designed by Baldassare Longhena and completed by Antonio Gaspari in 1710. Ca' Pesaro was bequeathed to the city by Duchess Felicita Bevilacqua La Masa in 1898 with the stipulation that it serve as a venue for emerging artists, and the building has functioned as Venice's modern art museum since 1902, accumulating a permanent collection that includes works by Klimt, Chagall, Kan.....

A museum of eighteenth-century Venetian life and art housed in a monumental baroque palazzo on the Grand Canal, designed by Baldassare Longhena in 1649 and completed by Giorgio Massari in 1756. The building itself, with its rusticated ground floor, giant-order columns, and theatrical waterfront facade, represents one of the finest examples of Venetian baroque palace architecture and provides an authentic aristocratic setting for the decorative arts and paintings displayed within its frescoed sal.....

The birthplace and childhood home of Carlo Goldoni, Venice's greatest playwright and the reformer who transformed Italian commedia dell'arte from improvised scenarios into scripted literary comedy during the eighteenth century. The fifteenth-century Gothic palazzo in the San Polo sestiere, with its characteristic well-head courtyard and external staircase, operates as a museum dedicated to Goldoni's life, work, and the theatrical culture of eighteenth-century Venice. The collection includes ori.....

The recurring Catalan presentation at the Venice Biennale, representing Catalonia's contemporary art scene through a collateral exhibition mounted in a Venetian venue during each Art and Architecture Biennale edition. As Catalonia is not a sovereign state, it participates not through an official national pavilion in the Giardini but through collateral events in rented palazzi, churches, or institutional spaces across the city, a format that allows curatorial flexibility but requires securing new.....

A deconsecrated church on Campo Santo Stefano in the San Marco sestiere that functions as a concert venue for the Interpreti Veneziani ensemble, presenting nightly performances of Vivaldi and Venetian baroque music in an intimate ecclesiastical setting. The church's seventeenth-century interior, with its single nave, side altars, and Carpaccio painting of San Vitale on horseback above the main altar, provides an atmospheric and acoustically sympathetic environment for chamber orchestra performan.....

A parish church in the San Polo sestiere rebuilt in the seventeenth century on medieval foundations, significant primarily for three major paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto in the chancel: the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Descent into Limbo, created between 1565 and 1568. These large-scale canvases demonstrate Tintoretto's dramatic use of diagonal composition, theatrical lighting, and muscular figure drawing that defined late Venetian Mannerism and anticipated the baroque sensibility. Th.....