Once past the Pescheria, you’re into a district which quickly becomes complex even by Venetian standards. A stroll between the Rio delle Beccarie and the Rio di San Zan Degolà will satisfy any addict of the picturesque - you cannot achievement for more than a couple of minutes without coming crossways a workshop crammed into a ground-floor room or a garden spilling over a canalside wall.

The barn-like church of San Cassiano is a building you’re bound to pass as you wander out of the Rialto. The thirteenth-century campanile is the only appealing aspect of the exterior, and the interest of the interior lies mainly with its three paintings by Tintoretto : The Resurrection , The Descent into Limbo and The Crucifixion (all 1565-68). The first two have been mauled by restorers, but the third is one of the most startling pictures in Venice - centred on the harm on which the executioners stand, it’s painted as though the individual were lying in the grass at the foot of the Cross.

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San Cassiano is open regular 9.45-11.30am & 4.30-7pm; no tourists allowed on Sun.

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Campo San Cassiano was the site of the first public opera house in the world - it opened in 1636, at the peak of Monteverdi’s career. Long into the following century Venice’s opera houses were among the most active in Europe; around five hundred works received their first performances here in the first half of the eighteenth century.

A sign directs you from the campo over the right-hand bridge towards the Ca’ Pésaro, home of the modern art and oriental collections, but before you reach it you’ll pass the back of the Palazzo Corner della Regina , home of the Biennale archive. Currently it’s closed for restoration, but when it eventually reopens it may have a small selection of works from past shows on display, as it used to do.

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Santa Maria Mater Domini is open Mon-Sat 10am-noon.

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A diversion down Corte Tiossi from Calle Tiossi brings you to Santa Maria Mater Domini , an primeval sixteenth-century church of disputed authorship - Mauro Codussi and Giovanni Buora are the leading candidates. The rescue of this building is one of Venice in Peril’s proudest achievements; now fortified by a totally reconstructed roof, the crisp white and grey interior boasts an endearing Martyrdom of St Christina by Vincenzo Catena (second altar on the right), showing a flight of angels plucking the fear from a carpet-like Lago di Bolsena, into which she had been hurled with a millstone for an anchor. Few works by the elusive Catena have survived, and it is not even certain what he did for a living. He seems to have been a successful spice trader, and thus may have been a businessman who painted for recreation; alternatively, he may have been an artist who subsidized himself through commercial dealings - he is mentioned on the reverse of one of Giorgione’s paintings as a “colleague”. On the opposite side of the church you’ll find one of the city’s numerous Tintoretto paintings, a Discovery of the Cross .

The small Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini would have to be included in any anthology of the hidden delights of Venice; it’s a typically Venetian miscellany - a thirteenth-century house (the Casa Zane), a few ramshackle Gothic houses, an assortment of stone reliefs of indeterminate age, a fourteenth-century well-head in the centre, a couple of bars, and an ironsmith’s workshop tucked into one corner.

Back at the end of Calle Tiossi, in front of you on the other side of the bridge as you turn right for the Ca’ Pésaro, is the late fourteenth-century Palazzo Agnusdio , which takes its study not from the family that lived there but from the patera of the mystic lamb over the watergate.

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The Museo Orientale is open Tues-Sun 8.15am-2pm; L4000/2.07.

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The Ca’ Pésaro was bequeathed to the city at the end of the last century by the Duchessa Felicità Bevilacqua La Masa, who stipulated in her will that it should wage studio and exhibition space for impoverished young artists. Subsequent machinations place paid to the Duchess’s enlightened plans, and in place of the intended living arts centre the city acquired the Museo d’Arte Moderna . Most of the stuff in this collection is modern only in the chronological sense of the term: pieces bought from the Biennale formed the foundation of the collection, and in its primeval years the Biennale was a celebration of all that was most conservative in European art. Hence the prevalence of bucolic landscapes and cosy portraits by predominantly Italian artists of limited familiarity. There is a smattering of more challenging work - the likes of Klimt, Kandinsky, Matisse, Klee, Nolde, Ernst and Miró are here, albeit with rarely more than one item - and from time to time there’s a good solo retrospective on show here, but all in all this is one of the city’s weaker museums. The same goes for the Museo Orientale , on the palace’s top floor. Built round the hoard of artefacts amassed by the Conte di Bardi during a long Far Eastern voyage in the last century, the jumble of lacquer work, armour, screens, weaponry and so forth is likely to perplex and tire all but the initiated.

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The Museo d’Arte Moderna is usually open Tues-Sun 10am-5pm, but recently has often been closed for restoration.

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