Venice invented the art market, the public opera house and the printed book trade. This route skips the Piazza and follows the paint instead: Tintoretto's 23-year obsession, Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo, La Fenice's gilded horseshoe and Murano's furnaces.
Five centuries of Venetian painting inside the former Scuola della Carità: Bellini's Madonnas, Carpaccio's St Ursula cycle, Giorgione's Tempest and Veronese's enormous Feast in the House of Levi. Open 08:15–19:15, Mondays until 14:00.
Peggy Guggenheim's one-storey, never-finished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni holds Pollock, Ernst, Picasso, Magritte, Brancusi and Calder, plus a sculpture garden where she and fourteen of her dogs are buried. Open 10:00–18:00, closed Tuesdays.
Tintoretto spent 23 years (1564–1587) covering this confraternity hall with more than 60 canvases, culminating in the Crucifixion in the Sala dell'Albergo — the largest painting he ever made. Open daily 09:30–17:30.
A vast Gothic brick barn built by Franciscans, holding Titian's Assumption above the high altar, his Pesaro Madonna, Bellini's Frari Triptych and Donatello's gaunt wooden John the Baptist. Mon–Sat 09:00–18:00.
Burned down in 1774, 1836 and 1996 and rebuilt each time com'era, dov'era — as it was, where it was. The daytime audio-guide tour covers the gilded five-tier auditorium, the royal box and the Maria Callas rooms.
A working second-hand bookshop that stores its stock in a full-size gondola, two bathtubs and waterproof bins, because the floor floods. Out the back, a staircase built from ruined encyclopaedias climbs to a canal view.
A Renaissance palace rebuilt around a Roman-style open courtyard by a family of antiquity collectors. The Tribuna reunites 130 classical statues under a skylight, beneath ceilings frescoed by Raphael's pupil Giovanni da Udine. Closed Mondays.
A resident string ensemble playing Vivaldi, Tartini and Corelli on period instruments in a deconsecrated 17th-century church with Carpaccio's altarpiece behind them. Concerts most evenings at 21:00, roughly 75 minutes.
The world's first ghetto, established 1516 on a foundry island — hence the word. Guided tours climb into three of the five synagogues hidden in upper floors, their interiors built by Venetian craftsmen who had never seen one.
Tintoretto's parish church and burial place, in a quiet corner of northern Cannaregio. Two towering canvases flank the chancel — the Last Judgement and the Worship of the Golden Calf — painted for free, for his neighbours.
A thousand years of glassmaking in the former Bishop's Palace: Roman fragments, Renaissance goblets spun thin as paper, and the 18th-century chandeliers that made the island rich. Vaporetto 4.1 from Fondamente Nove, about 10 minutes.
Painted fishermen's houses in a colour code residents still have to request permission to change, and six centuries of needle lace made without a loom. The main square empties around 18:00 when the last day-trip boats leave.