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This spacious, elegant square is edged by cafés with smart, white-jacketed waiters and colourful awnings. Its most regular inhabitants seem to be unhurried pigeons, pecking around the ornate lampposts, and local children at play watched over by nannies and doting grandparents. Pride of place in the centre goes to a statue of Niccolò Tommaseo, patriot and author of the Risorgimento . At Carnival time a lively outdoor craft market is held here, although it is not quite up to the level of merrymaking seen here in olden times when there were magnificent balls and bull-fights. The latter events ended in 1802 when a stand collapsed on spectators.

So overloaded was the 1668 façade of this church with ostentatious Baroque stone decorations that several statues were removed in 1878 to save it from collapse. It has been blasted by critics as “the height of architectural folly” and by John Ruskin (see Ruskin’s Venice, editor Arnold Whittick) as “one of the basest examples of the basest school of the Renaissance”. Devoid of religious symbols, it is given over wholly to the glorification of the aristocratic Fini family, who laid out 30,000 ducats for the job.

Flamboyant Spanish artist and theatrical stage designer Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871–1950) adopted Venice as his home and muse, and transformed this ponderous 15th-century palace in Gothic-Venetian style into an exotic atelier. Although restoration is on-going, a number of rooms are open for temporary exhibitions. In the near future visitors will be able to admire Fortuny’s sumptuous velvets, renowned the world over, his famous pleated silk dresses, lamps, paintings, a remarkable stage curtain and fascinating 19th-century photographs.

(see Piazza San Marco).

Often used as a film set, this fine 15th-century palace with its beautiful external “snail-shell” staircase is squeezed into a diminutive square. Following careful restoration, visitors can now climb the winding steps via five floors of loggias to a dome sheltering a splendid belvedere. From here there are magical views over the city’s rooftops.

Long masked in scaffolding since a 1996 arson attack left it gutted, the historic “Phoenix” theatre has finally risen from the flames. Selva’s 1792 opera house, just one of 17 theatres at the time, has staged countless world premieres including Rossini’s Tancredi in 1813, five operas commissioned of Verdi, most notably Rigoletto and La Traviata , and more recent works by Stravinsky and Luigi Nono. Legendary divas Maria Callas and Dame Joan Sutherland have sung in this glorious setting.