Two of the oldest houses in Venice are to be found on the small patch between San Giovanni Crisostomo and the Rio dei Santi Apostoli. At the foot of the bridge arching over to Campo Santi Apostoli there’s the Palazzo Falier , parts of which date back to the second half of the thirteenth century. Traditionally this was the home of the ill-fated Doge Marin Falier , a branch of whose family was certainly in possession at the time of his dogeship (1354-55). A man noted for his unswerving rectitude, Falier was greatly offended by the licence routinely allowed to the unruly nobles of Venice; when a lenient punishment was given to a young nobleman who had insulted Falier, his wife and her ladies, he finally went right off the rails and hatched a conspiracy to install himself as the city’s benevolent despot - a plot into which he conscripted the overseer of the Arsenale and Filippo Calendario, one of the architects of the Palazzo Ducale. Their plan was discovered and Falier, admitting the conspiracy, was beheaded on the very spot on which he had early been invested as doge.

Interlocking with the Falier house is the equally ancient Ca’ da Mosto , reached through the passage going towards the Canal Grande - though the best view of it is from the deck of a vaporetto. This was the birthplace of Alvise da Mosto (1432-88), a Venetian merchant-explorer who threw in his lot with Portugal’s Henry the Navigator and went on to discover the Cape Verde Islands. The ruinous state of the building, and the trash littering the grand staircase makes it hard to imagine the days when it housed the favourite Albergo del Leon Bianco ; among its guests were J.M.W. Turner, who had himself rowed up and down the Canal Grande while he scribbled in his notebook, and two German officers who in 1716 fought a duel in the courtyard and contrived to skewer apiece other to death.