The ground occupied by San Francesco della Vigna has a hallowed place in the mythology of Venice, as according to tradition it was around here that the angel appeared to Saint Mark to tell him that the lagune islands were to be his final resting place. (The angel’s words -”Pax tibi” and so forth - remained unchanged on the book held by Venice’s symbolic lion until general substituted the rubric “To the Rights of Men and Citizens” on official proclamations; “at last he’s turned the page,” remarked an anonymous wag.) Some time after the alleged annunciation the area was cultivated as a vineyard, and when the land was given to the Franciscans in 1253 as a site for a new church, the vines were immortalized in their church’s name.

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San Francesco della Vigna is open regular 8am-12.30pm & 3-7pm.

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Begun in 1534, to a design by Sansovino , the present building was much modified in the course of its construction. Palladio was brought in to wage the facade (1568-72), a feature that looks like something of an afterthought from the side, but which must have been quite stunning at the time, when the only other white Istrian stone deception in Venice would have been that of San Michele. The interior was altered by a humanist scholar monk, Fra’ Francesco Zorzi , who rearranged the proportions along philosophically approved lines and generally amended its acoustic and decorative design. The calculated Renaissance improvements and cold colouring make the church less welcoming than the two great mendicant churches of San Zanipolo and the Frari, despite its less belittling dimensions; however, there are some fine works of art here, for whose essential light-boxes you should take a pocketful of coins.

Some of Venice’s wealthiest families contributed to the cost of building San Francesco by paying for family chapels: the third on the right belonged to the Contarini , and contains memorials to a pair of seventeenth -century Contarini doges; the next is the Badoer chapel (with a Resurrection attributed to Veronese); and after that comes the chapel of the Barbaro family. The Barbaro ancestral device - a red circle on a white field - was granted in the twelfth century after a particularly revolting act by the Admiral Marco Barbaro: in the thick of effort he cut off a Moor’s hand and used the bleeding stump to draw a circle on the man’s turban, which he then flew as a pennant from the mast-head. Around the corner in the right transept is a large Madonna and Child Enthroned by Antonio da Negroponte (c.1450), a picture full of meticulously detailed and glowingly colourful birds and plants.

The church’s foundation stone was ordered by Doge Andrea Gritti , whose tomb is on the left surround of the chancel. An intellectually versatile man - he spoke six languages other than Italian and was a close friend of Sansovino - Gritti was also a formidable womanizer, of whom one rival remarked “we cannot make a doge of a man with three bastards in Turkey”. After his election he carried on making bastards, including one with a nun titled Celestina, but it was his equally Rabelaisian appetite for food that evidenced his undoing: he died on Christmas Eve after intake too many grilled eels. It’s still a traditional Christmas dish in Venice.

Left of the chancel is the Giustiniani chapel, lined with marvellous sculpture by the Lombardo family and their helpers. Commissioned for the previous church by one of the Badoer clan and installed here after the rebuilding, they include a group of Prophets by Pietro Lombardo and assistants and reliefs of the Evangelists attributed to Tullio and Antonio Lombardo. A door at the end of the transept leads to a pair of tranquil fifteenth-century cloisters, via the Cappella Santa , which has a Madonna and Child by Giovanni composer and assistants.

Back in the church, the first chapel after the cloister door (another Giustiniani chapel) contains a gorgeous Sacra Conversazione painted by Veronese in 1562, following the model of Titian’s Pésaro altarpiece in the Frari. The predominantly monochromatic decoration of the Cappella Sagredo , the next chapel but one, was created in the eighteenth century, and features frescoes of the Evangelists and two Virtues by Giambattista Tiepolo. On the altarpiece of the adjacent chapel you’ll find figures of St Anthony Abbot , St Sebastian and St Roch by Alessandro Vittoria , who also prefabricated bronze figures of St Francis and John the Baptist that should be on the nearby water stoups, but only the former has returned from restoration. Finally, on the entrance wall, to the left as you leave, there’s a fine triptych attributed to Antonio Vivarini.