Frari Church

The Franciscans arrived in Venice in 1226, and being Franciscans — sworn to poverty and simplicity — they immediately set about building one of the largest churches in the city. The Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari took over a century to complete, and its plain brick exterior hides an interior that's anything but austere. This is where Venice's greatest painters came to make their names, and where one of them came to be buried.

Titian's "Assumption of the Virgin" dominates the main altar — a massive 22-by-12-foot explosion of colour that scandalized Venice when it was unveiled in 1518. The city was used to demure, static Madonnas; Titian gave them a Mary who looks genuinely astonished to be rising to heaven, surrounded by apostles who seem as shocked as she is. It established the young painter as the foremost artist in Venice, and he never really let go of the title. His tomb is here too, a grand marble affair that the Austrian occupiers built for him in the 19th century.

The other masterpiece you can't miss is Giovanni Bellini's triptych in the sacristy — a Madonna and Child with saints that glows with the kind of soft, warm light that made the Venetian school revolutionary. Donatello's wooden sculpture of St. John the Baptist, gaunt and wild-eyed, is the only work by the great Florentine sculptor still in Venice.

The church retains the only surviving choir screen in Venice, a marble partition built in 1475 to separate the friars from the public during services. Most Venetian churches tore theirs down during Counter-Reformation renovations. The Frari kept its, giving the interior a sense of layered mystery that other churches lost.