Discover Chiesa di San Zaccaria

The facade is the clearest architectural lesson in Venice, because the change of mind is visible from the campo. Antonio Gambello began it in Gothic around 1458 and got as far as the lower storeys, with their pointed niches and Gothic proportions; after his death in 1481 Mauro Codussi finished the upper half in the Renaissance manner he had brought back from Lombardy -- paired round-headed windows, classical pilasters, and a great semicircular crowning gable. The seam runs across the front at roughly the height of the first cornice, and nothing was done to disguise it.

Inside, the plan is unlike any other church in the city. San Zaccaria has a proper ambulatory -- an aisle curving behind the high altar with radiating chapels off it -- which belongs to French and northern Gothic cathedral building and appears nowhere else in Venice. It gives the east end a depth and a walkable circuit that a standard Venetian apse does not have.

The nave is unusually tall and narrow for its width, with vaulting that pushes the height further, and the whole interior is hung with paintings almost floor to ceiling in the 17th-century manner -- a picture gallery arrangement layered over 15th-century architecture.

Beneath it all survives the crypt of the 10th-century church, a low forest of squat columns and groin vaults that predates everything above by five hundred years and now stands permanently in water.