Ca' d'Oro

The "House of Gold" hasn't been golden for over four hundred years, but the name stuck. When Marino Contarini built this palazzo between 1421 and 1437, the facade was covered in gold leaf, ultramarine blue, and vermillion — a floating jewel box on the Grand Canal designed to announce that the Contarini family, which had already produced eight doges, wasn't about to be outdone by anyone.

The gold wore off by 1600, victim of salt air and sun, but the lace-like Gothic stonework that remains is arguably more beautiful without it. The facade is the finest surviving example of Venetian Gothic architecture: a symphony of pointed arches, quatrefoils, and open loggias that manage to look both impossibly delicate and structurally sound. Architects Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon created something that looks more like embroidery than engineering.

The building had a rough few centuries after the Contarinis. It passed through various owners who stripped it of its original features — one 19th-century owner, the ballerina Marie Taglioni, ripped out the original staircase and wellhead. Baron Giorgio Franchetti bought it in 1894 and spent decades restoring it, filling it with his art collection before donating the whole lot to the Italian state in 1916.

Today it's the Galleria Franchetti, a small museum that most tourists skip in favour of the bigger names. Their loss. The collection includes Mantegna's "St. Sebastian," Titian's fragment of a Venus, and some of the best views of the Grand Canal from any museum in the city. The original wellhead in the courtyard, carved by Bartolomeo Bon himself, is one of the most beautiful objects in Venice — and almost nobody stops to look at it.