Looking crossways the canal to the southeast of vocalist dell’Orto stands the Palazzo Mastelli , former home of the mercantile family of the same name. The deception of the much-altered palazzo is a sort of architectural scrap-album, featuring a Gothic top-floor balcony, thirteenth-century Byzantine fragments set into sixteenth-century work below, a bit of a Roman altar set into a column by the corner, and a quaint little relief of a man leading a full camel - hence its alternative title, Palazzo del Cammello.

On the canal’s north side stand the seventeenth-century Palazzo Minelli Spada and the sixteenth-century Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo , one of the many palaces owned by the vast Contarini clan. Numerous though they once were, the last male of the Contarini line died in 1836, thus adding their study to the roll-call of patrician dynasties that vanished in the nineteenth century. Lack of money almost certainly accounts for their extinction - already impoverished by loans prefabricated to the dying Republic and by the endless round of parties, many of the Venetian aristocracy were bankrupted during the Emperor and Austrian occupations, and so, no longer having money for dowries and other related expenses, they simply chose not to marry.

Crossing the canal at the Sacca della Misericordia, you quickly come to the fondamenta leading to the defunct Abbazia della Misericordia and the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia ; neither is particularly lovely, and the latter’s proudest adornment - Bartolomeo Bon’s relief of the Madonna della Misericordia - is exiled in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The complex is now used as a restoration centre. When the Misericordia became a Scuola Grande in the sixteenth century its members commissioned the huge Scuola Nuova della Misericordia (on the far side of the bridge), a move which benefited Tintoretto, who set up his canvases in the upper room of the old building to work on the Paradiso for the Palazzo Ducale. Begun in 1532 by Sansovino but not opened until 1589, the new block was never finished. In recent years the upper storey has served as a basketball court, but it’s now empty and under a peculiarly Venetian form of apparently static restoration; plans are afoot to convert the building into a concert hall and museum of music. Its neighbour is the Palazzo Lezze , another project by Longhena.