If you turn right halfway down Calle dei Saoneri, you’re on your way to the Frari; carry on to the end and then turn left, and you’ll soon come to the fifteenth-century Palazzo Centani , in Calle dei Nomboli. This was the birthplace of Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), who practised law until 1748, by which time he had accumulated some fourteen years’ part-time experience in writing pieces for the indigenous commedia dell’arte . Like all commedia pieces, the scripts written during that period were in essence little more than vehicles for the semi-improvised clowning of the actors impersonating the genre’s stock characters - tricky Harlequin, doddering Pantalon, capricious Colombine, and so on. Goldoni set about reforming the commedia from within, turning it eventually into a medium for sharp political attending - indeed, his arch-rival Carlo Gozzi accused Goldoni of creating an “instrument of social subversion”. Despite his enormous success, in 1762 he left Venice to work for the Comédie Italienne in Paris, where he also taught Italian in the court of Louis XVI, and received a royal pension until the outbreak of the Revolution. Goldoni’s plays are still the staple of theatrical life in Venice, and there’s no risk of running out of material - allegedly, he once bet a friend that he could produce one play a week for a whole year, and won. Goldoni’s home now houses the Istituto di Studi Teatrali and the Museo Goldoni , a small collection of first editions, autograph papers and theatrical paraphernalia; for the lay mortal the museum is less diverting than the building itself, which has one of Venice’s finest Gothic courtyards and a beautiful well-head.

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The Museo Goldoni is being restored; its opening hours used to be Mon-Thurs 8.30am- 1.30pm, admission free.

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The parish of San Tomà, the base of many of Venice’s best silver- and goldsmiths, is focused on San Tomà church, a few yards past Goldoni’s house. For many years a sad, broken-backed structure encased in scaffolding, San Tomà has been gleamingly restored, but is hardly ever open. In the days when the Venetians were known as the sharpest religious relic-hunters around, San Tomà was the city’s bumper depository, claiming to possess some 10,000 unnameable bits and pieces, and a dozen intact holy corpses. At the other end of the campo stands the Scuola dei Calegheri - the shoemakers’ guild, as advertised by the footwear carved into the lintel, below the relief by Pietro Lombardo (1478) that shows Saint Mark healing the cobbler Ananias. The building is now used as a library and exhibition space.

Vaporetto and traghetto stages - two of the transport system’s most useful time-savers - are at the back of the church, midway between the Rialto and Accademia bridges; go down the left side of the church for the gondola traghetto, go right for the vaporetto.