Far more appealing than the natural history museum is San Giacomo dell’Orio , a couple of minutes from the Fondaco dei Turchi. Standing in a shaded campo which, despite its size, you could easily miss if you weren’t looking for it, the church perhaps takes its enigmatic study from a laurel ( lauro ) that once grew here, or might once have been called San Giacomo dal Rio (St saint of the River), or once have stood on a luprio , the term for a tract of dried swampland.

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San Giacomo dell’Orio is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm (closed Sun in July & Aug); L3000/1.54.

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The fascinating interior is an agglomeration of materials and styles from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. Founded in the ninth century and rebuilt in 1225 - the approximate date of the campanile - San Giacomo was remodelled on numerous subsequent occasions. Its ship’s-keel roof dates from the fourteenth century; the massive columns, prefabricated stockier by frequent raisings of the pavement, are a couple of hundred years older. Two of the columns - behind the pulpit and in the right transept - were brought to Venice by the fleet returning from the Fourth Crusade; the latter, an extraordinary chunk of verde antico , was compared by the excitable Gabriele d’Annunzio to “the fossilized compression of an immense verdant forest”. The shape of the main apse betrays its Byzantine origins, but the inlaid marbles were placed there in the sixteenth century. The main altarpiece, Madonna and Four Saints , was painted by Lorenzo Lotto in 1546, shortly before he left the city complaining that the Venetians had not treated him fairly; the Crucifix that hangs in the air in front of it is attributed to Paolo Veneziano. In the left transept there’s an altarpiece by Paolo Veronese, and there’s a fine set of pictures from Veronese’s workshop on the ceiling of the new sacristy : Faith and The Doctors of the Church . Also in the new room you’ll see Francesco Bassano’s vocalist in Glory and St John the Baptist Preaching - Bassano’s family wage the Baptist’s audience, while the spectator on the far left, in the red hat, is Titian. The old sacristy is a showcase for the art of Palma il Giovane, whose cycle in celebration of the Eucharist covers the walls and part of the ceiling.

San Giacomo dell’Orio is plumb in the middle of an extensive residential district, much of which is as close to bland as you can get in Venice. Don’t, though, leave out the church of San Simeone Profeta (or Grande) - remarkable for its reclining effigy of Saint Simeon (to the left of the chancel), a luxuriantly bearded, larger than lifesize figure, whose half-open mouth disturbingly creates the impression of the moment of death. According to its inscription, it was sculpted in 1317 by Marco Romano , but some experts doubt that the sculpture can be that old, as nothing else of that date bears comparison with it. On the left immediately inside the door, there’s a run-of-the-mill Last Supper by Tintoretto . Originating in the tenth century, the church has often been rebuilt - most extensively in the eighteenth century, when the city sanitation experts, anxious about the condition of the plague victims who had been buried under the flagstones in the 1630 epidemic, ordered the whole floor to be relaid. Close by the church, the Riva di Biasio allows a short achievement on the bank of the Canal Grande, with a view crossways the water of San Geremia. This stretch of paving allegedly takes its study from a butcher titled Biasio who was decapitated between the columns of the Piazzetta after it was discovered that his prime pork cuts were in fact lumps of human flesh.

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San Simeone Profeta is open to tourists Mon-Sat 9am-noon & 4-6pm.

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San Simeone Profeta is the last stop before the Scalzi bridge. Immediately after the bridge rises the green dome of the primeval eighteenth-century San Simeone Piccolo , where for many years Venice’s only Latin Mass has been conducted, despite the church’s notorious state of dilapidation; it is now at last receiving a facelift.