Santa Maria della Salute

This church is a prayer made stone. In 1630, the plague arrived in Venice and killed a third of the population — roughly 46,000 people in the city alone, with another 94,000 dead across the lagoon. On October 22, Doge Nicolò Contarini stood before the Senate in San Marco and vowed to build a grand church dedicated to the Virgin Mary if the city were delivered. He died of the plague himself five months later, the day after construction began.

The 26-year-old architect Baldassare Longhena won the commission with a design he described as shaped "in the form of a crown" for the Virgin. The massive octagonal structure sits on over a million wooden pilings driven into the muddy entrance of the Grand Canal, and took more than fifty years to complete. Longhena died in 1682, five years before the consecration. He spent his entire adult life building a single church.

The Salute's massive dome dominates the entrance to the Grand Canal, and every painter who's ever sat at a Venetian easel has rendered it — Turner, Monet, Sargent, Canaletto. It might be the most painted church in the world after St. Peter's. The interior is surprisingly bare compared to the ornate exterior, though it houses important paintings by Titian and Tintoretto in the sacristy.

Every November 21, Venetians celebrate the Festa della Salute, when a temporary pontoon bridge is built across the Grand Canal so that the faithful can walk directly to the church. It's the city's most beloved local festival, when Venetians light candles, eat castradina (dried mutton stew, a recipe from the plague era), and give thanks that the city survived.