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.....

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.....

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.....

Andrea Palladio's masterwork of ecclesiastical architecture, completed in 1610 on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore directly facing the Piazza San Marco across the basin. The church's white Istrian stone facade, with its interlocking temple fronts of giant Composite columns, creates a luminous classical presence that anchors the view from the Piazzetta and provides the defining southern horizon of Venice's most photographed panorama. The interior applies Palladio's principles of mathematical p.....

A jewel-box Renaissance church in the Cannaregio sestiere, built between 1481 and 1489 by Pietro Lombardo and his sons to house a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary. The church's exterior is clad entirely in polychrome marble panels -- white, grey, green, and porphyry -- creating a precious, almost reliquary-like presence within the narrow street and canal space it occupies. The building is often described as Venice's most beautiful small church and is the city's most popular venue for weddings.....

The Ponte della Costituzione, the fourth bridge to span Venice's Grand Canal, designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2008 connecting the Piazzale Roma bus terminal to the Santa Lucia railway station area. The bridge's single steel arch and glass-paved deck represent the first significant modern architectural intervention on the Grand Canal since the 1930s Accademia Bridge, and generated fierce controversy over the appropriateness of contemporary design in Venice's historic fabric. The str.....

Ten dollars bought a membership in 1899, Henry Ford later paid his dues here, and Aretha Franklin is believed to have recorded an album in her house beside the seventh hole. The Detroit Golf Club at 17911 Hamilton Road, in a leafy neighbourhood beside the University of Detroit Mercy and the Palmer Woods Historic District, was founded in 1899 by piano-and-organ businessman William R. Farrand and a circle of friends, starting as a six-hole course on rented farmland at Six Mile and Woodward with me.....

The former seat of government of the Republic of Venice for over a thousand years, this Gothic masterpiece on the Piazzetta San Marco is one of the supreme achievements of medieval secular architecture. The palace's famous facade, with its arcade of pointed arches supporting a loggia of quatrefoil tracery above which pink and white marble walls shimmer in reflected light from the lagoon, inverts the conventional expectation of a government building: delicate openwork below, solid mass above. In.....

Bobby Jones played his first round of golf here and his last, and the course that raised him now crowns the PGA Tour's season every September. East Lake Golf Club at 2575 Alston Drive SE, five miles east of downtown Atlanta, was established in 1904 when the Atlanta Athletic Club - whose athletics director was John Heisman, of trophy fame - bought a former amusement-park tract in DeKalb County and had Tom Bendelow lay out the city's first golf course. The 18-hole course and clubhouse opened on 4 .....

Designed by master golf architect William Flynn and opened for play on Memorial Day 1928, Lehigh Country Club occupies roughly 205 acres along the Little Lehigh Creek in the rolling hills of the Lehigh Valley near Allentown, Pennsylvania. Flynn, whose portfolio includes Shinnecock Hills and The Country Club at Brookline, crafted a routing that exploits 105 feet of elevation change across a parkland setting framed by specimen trees and intersected by the stream. The club's origins trace to the e.....