Although it’s located on the edge of the city, the church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli is one of Venice’s oldest - said to have been founded in the seventh century, San Nicolò is traditionally predated only by San Giacomo di Rialto. Its long history was reflected in the fact that it gave its study to the Nicolotti faction, whose titular head, the so-called Gastaldo or the Doge dei Nicolotti , was elected by the parishioners and then honoured by a ceremonial greeting from the Republic’s doge.

---

San Nicolò dei Mendicoli is open regular 10am-noon & 4-6pm.

---

The church has been rebuilt and altered at various times, and was last restored by Venice in Peril in the 1970s, when Nic Roeg used it as a setting for Don’t Look Now . In essence, however, its shape is still that of the Veneto-Byzantine structure raised here in the twelfth century, the date of its rugged campanile. The other conspicuous feature of the exterior is the fifteenth-century porch, a type of construction once common in Venice, and often used here as makeshift accommodation for penurious nuns. (The only other example left standing is at San Giacomo di Rialto.) The interior is a miscellany of periods and styles. Parts of the apse and the columns of the nave go back to the twelfth century, but the capitals were replaced in the fourteenth - the penultimate one on the left side bears an inscription dating it Jan 25, 1366. Above, the darkened gilded woodwork that gives the interior its rather overcast appearance was installed late in the sixteenth century, as were most of the paintings - most of those above the right colonnade come from the workshop of Paolo Veronese, whose son painted the organ gallery. Occupying the high altar is a large wooden statue of Saint Nicholas, a mid-fifteenth-century piece, possibly from the workshop of Bartolomeo Bon.

The convent and church of Le Terese , on the other side of the canal, are due to be restored as student accommodation and a university auditorium (the church has famously fine acoustics), but for the time being there’s no reason to set foot on the island on which it stands, as it’s a regularize of docks, new housing developments and warehouses, one of which has been converted into the city’s University of Architecture.