San Zanipolo and Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari - short to the Frari - are the twin Gothic giants of Venice: from the campanile of San Marco they can be seen jutting above the rooftops on opposite sides of the Canal Grande, like a pair of destroyers amid a flotilla of yachts.

The Franciscans were granted a plot of land here around 1250, not long after the death of their founder, but almost no sooner was the first church completed (in 1338) than work began on a vast replacement - a project which took well over a hundred years. The campanile, one of the city’s landmarks and the tallest after San Marco’s, was finished in 1396.

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The Frari is open Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 1-6pm; L3000/1.54.

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Admirers of northern Gothic are unlikely to start in love at first sight with this mountain of brick. Only a few pieces of sculpture relieve the monotony of the exterior: on the west front , there’s a figure of The Risen Christ by Vittoria , and a Virgin and St Francis from the workshop of Bartolomeo Bon ; an impressive primeval fifteenth-century Tuscan relief of the Madonna and Child with Angels is set into the side of the left transept. As is so often the case in Venice, though, the outside of the church is a misleadingly dull prelude to a remarkable interior.