Basilica dei Frari

The Franciscan friars — the frari from which the church takes its short name — were given the site in 1227, only a year after the death of Saint Francis. The first small church went up by 1280; the present one, larger and more ambitious, was begun a hundred years later and consecrated in 1492. Brick on the outside, fitted out slowly inside, the basilica is the second-largest church in Venice after San Marco — and at 102 metres long, the longest medieval space in the city.

The high altar is Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18), still in the position it was painted for: framed in the choir-screen archway, exactly the right distance and height to read at full height from the nave. The friars almost rejected it on delivery — the figures were thought too monumental, the colour too bright — but the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador offered to buy the rejected canvas on the spot, which decided the matter. It made Titian's career.

Around it: the Pesaro altarpiece (1526), also by Titian, set sideways into the left aisle and famously tilting the saints toward an off-centre Virgin; Giovanni Bellini's triptych of 1488 in the sacristy, hung at its original height; the wooden monks' choir of 1468 by Marco Cozzi, the only major Venetian medieval choir to keep its original screen across the nave; and the tombs of Titian and Canova, facing each other across the nave.

Canova's monument is itself a curiosity: a marble pyramid carved by his pupils in 1827 from a design Canova had drawn up forty years earlier as a never-realised tomb for Titian. Only Canova's heart is buried inside it. Titian's own tomb across the way, by contrast, was added in 1852 — an attempt by the Hapsburg administration to make good on three centuries of Venetian inattention.

Pay the small extra fee for the sacristy. Bellini's triptych is hung at its original height in its original frame — almost the only Renaissance altarpiece in Venice that has never been moved.