A city where the paintings are still in the rooms they were painted for, and where, every other year, the whole world comes to show its newest art.
Venetian painting from the Byzantine gold grounds to Tiepolo: Bellini, Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese, and Giorgione's The Tempest.
Tintoretto spent more than twenty years covering a confraternity's halls with around sixty paintings. It is overwhelming, and that was the point.
A vast Gothic brick church with Titian's Assumption over the high altar, still in the frame he painted it for.
The national pavilions in the gardens, and the main exhibition in the ropewalks of the old shipyard. In 2026: In Minor Keys, the exhibition conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh.
Peggy Guggenheim's unfinished palazzo on the Grand Canal: Pollock, Ernst, Magritte, Brancusi, and her own grave in the garden, beside her dogs.
The old customs house at the tip of Dorsoduro, reworked by Tadao Ando for the Pinault Collection's contemporary shows.
The Pinault Collection's other Venetian home, an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal used for large monographic shows.
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
One small room, wood-panelled, with Carpaccio's cycle of saints painted for the Dalmatian community around 1502–07.
Carlo Scarpa's 1958 showroom for Olivetti typewriters under the arcades: a staircase of floating marble slabs and a floor of glass tesserae.
A patrician family's house museum with a ground floor and garden redesigned by Carlo Scarpa, who let the canal in at high tide.
The lagoon's first settlement, almost empty now. The cathedral has an 11th–12th-century Last Judgement mosaic covering its west wall.
The city's island cemetery, walled in pink brick and cypresses. Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Ezra Pound are buried here.
Mariano Fortuny's Gothic palazzo and studio: his lamps, painted fabrics and the heavy velvet atmosphere of a working house.
A late-15th-century spiral staircase, a 'bovolo' or snail in Venetian, wound around the outside of a palazzo tower and hidden in a courtyard.
One of the last boatyards where gondolas are still built and repaired, in wooden houses that look as if they came from the Dolomites.
Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, 30 minutes by train: book a slot.
Canova's birthplace and his Gipsoteca, with Carlo Scarpa's extension, about 90 minutes by car.
The Frari at opening → Scuola Grande di San Rocco next door → lunch → the Accademia → the Peggy Guggenheim Collection → walk to Punta della Dogana for the light at the end of the day.