Discover Campo Santo Stefano

The church is entered through a Gothic doorway of the early 15th century, carved in marble and set into a plain brick front -- the most decorated thing about a facade that is otherwise deliberately unremarkable.

The interior is the reason to go in. The nave is roofed with a carena di nave ceiling: a wooden vault built in the shape of an inverted ship's hull, assembled by shipwrights from the Arsenale using the methods they used on boats. Venice built this way because it had shipbuilders rather than stone vaulters, and because a timber roof is far lighter on soft ground than masonry.

The campanile stands apart from the church and leans by as much as two metres. It is among the tallest in the city, and its tilt is not a curiosity but the standard consequence of putting great weight on a mudbank -- the same problem that brought down the tower at Santa Fosca in 1410.

The building was begun around 1294 by Augustinian friars, largely rebuilt in the 14th century and altered again in the early 15th, so the fabric is a sequence of Gothic campaigns rather than a single design.