Calle della Lacca-Fondamenta Sacchere-Calle Amai is a dullish but uncomplicated route from San Giovanni Evangelista to the portentous church of San Nicolò da Tolentino - alias the Tolentini . Venetian home of the Theatine Order, which found refuge in Venice after the Sack of Rome by the army of Charles V in 1527, it was begun in 1590 by Palladio’s follower Scamozzi, and finished in 1714 by the addition of a freestanding portico - the first in Venice - designed by Andrea Tirali. Among the scores of seventeenth-century paintings, just two stand out. The first is a St Jerome by Johann Lys, on the surround outside the chancel, to the left; it was painted in 1628, just two years before German-born Lys died of the plague, aged thirty-three. The other is St Lawrence Giving Alms by Bernardo Strozzi, round the corner from the Lys painting. Up the left surround of the chancel swirls the best Baroque monument in Venice: the monument to Francesco Morosini , created in 1678 by a Genoese sculptor, Filippo Parodi. That’s Francesco Morosini, Patriarch of Venice, on no statement to be confused with Francesco Morosini, Doge of Venice 1688-94, buried in Santo Stefano - though that Francesco Morosini did present the Tolentini with the flag of the Turkish general whom he had trounced in the Morea in 1685.

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The Tolentini is open regular 8am-noon & 4.30-7pm.

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If fatigue is setting in and you need a pit-stop, the Giardino Papadopoli , formerly one of Venice’s biggest private gardens but now owned by the city, is just over the Rio dei Tolentini. In winter you may have to make do with the pavement, since the park’s often shut then.