Discover Chiesa dei Gesuiti

Domenico Rossi's facade of 1715-28 is a competent, conventional Baroque front -- a two-tier composition in white Istrian stone, statues of apostles along the crowning balustrade, and nothing about it that prepares a visitor for the interior. The mismatch is not accidental: the Jesuits spent their money inside.

The plan is a Latin cross with a single wide nave and shallow side chapels, the standard Counter-Reformation arrangement that keeps every worshipper in sight of the high altar. What is done with that plain shell is the point. The nave walls and pilasters are faced in verde antico and white marble, inlaid and carved so that the stone reads as hanging damask -- folds, tassels, seams and a fringed pelmet running the length of the nave, all of it cut from stone. The same illusion continues onto the pulpit, where a marble curtain appears to have been thrown back and left to drape.

The high altar carries a baldachin on ten twisted columns of verde antico, modelled on Bernini's at St Peter's and scaled down for a Venetian parish. Overhead, Francesco Fontebasso's ceiling paintings of 1734 open the vault into painted sky, and Palma the Younger's twenty canvases line the sacristy -- a room that survived from the earlier complex and was reused rather than rebuilt.