Discover Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari

A vast brick church in San Polo with almost no stone on it — plain red walls and buttresses rising straight out of a small campo, too large for the space around it to let you see it whole. Inside it is one enormous unbroken volume under a timber tie-beam roof, with a carved wooden choir standing free in the middle of the nave, so the altarpiece at the far end is framed through it rather than seen directly.

The Frari is built of brick rather than stone, in the Italian Gothic style shared by only two other churches in Venice. Its scale is substantial for the city -- one of the largest church interiors in Venice, with a nave and two side aisles separated by tall columns rising to wooden tie-beams rather than full stone vaulting, a practical adaptation to Venice's soft, unstable ground.

The rood screen dividing the nave from the choir is the only one to survive intact in any Venetian church -- elsewhere, these dividers were typically removed after the Counter-Reformation favored an unobstructed view of the altar.