A couple of minutes’ achievement north of La Pietà the campanile of San Giorgio dei Greci lurches spectacularly canalwards. The Greek presence in Venice was strong from the eleventh century, and became stronger still after the Turkish seizure of Constantinople. This mid-fifteenth-century influx of Greek speakers provided a resource which was exploited by the city’s numerous scholarly publishing houses, and greatly enriched the general culture of Renaissance Venice: the daughter of the condottiere Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, for example, is known to have written perfect Greek at the age of ten. At its peak, the Greek community numbered around 4000, some of whom were immensely rich: a Greek merchant murdered in Venice in 1756 left 4,000,000 ducats to his daughters, a legacy that was said to have prefabricated them the richest heiresses in Europe.

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San Giorgio dei Greci is open Mon-Sat 9.30am-1pm & 3.30- 5.30pm, Sun 9am-1pm.

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The church was built in 1539-61 to a Sansovino-influenced design by Sante Lombardo ; the cupola and campanile came later in the century. Inside, the Orthodox architectural elements include a matroneo (women’s gallery) above the main entrance and an iconostasis (or rood screen) that completely cuts off the high altar. The icons on the screen are a mixture of works by a sixteenth-century Cretan artist called Michael Danaskinàs and a few Byzantine pieces dating back as far as the twelfth century.

Permission to found an Orthodox church was given at the end of the fifteenth century, and a Greek college (the Collegio Flangini) and scuola were approved at the same time. The college, redesigned in 1678 by Longhena , is now home to the Hellenic Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, custodian of Venice’s Greek archives. Longhena also redesigned the Scuola di San Nicolò dei Greci, to the left of the church, which now houses the Museo di Dipinti Sacri Bizantini , a collection of predominantly fifteenth- to eighteenth- century icons, many of them by the Madoneri , the school of Greek and Cretan artists working in Venice in that period.

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The Museo di Dipinti Sacri Bizantini is open Mon-Sat 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-4.15pm; Sun 10am- 5pm; L7000/3.62.

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Although many of the most beautiful of these works maintain the compositional and symbolic conventions of picture painting, it’s fascinating to notice the impact of Western influences - one or two of the artists achieve a synthesis, while others clearly struggle to harmonize the two worlds.

The area to the north of San Giorgio dei Greci is more interesting for its associations than its sights. The unfinished and hangar-like San Lorenzo - undergoing a glacially slow restoration - was where Marco Polo was buried, but his sarcophagus went astray during sixteenth-century rebuilding. Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Relic of the Cross , now in the Accademia, depicts an extraordinary incident that once occurred in the Rio di San Lorenzo.