Discover Campo San Salvador

The church of San Salvador hides an unusual plan behind a conventional front. Giorgio Spavento's design of about 1508 sets three square, domed bays in a row down the nave, each with a smaller domed bay between -- so the interior is not a single hall but a sequence of centralised spaces strung together. It takes the Byzantine idea behind St Mark's and rebuilds it in Renaissance geometry, which no other church in the city does.

Spavento died in 1509, a year after starting. Tullio Lombardo carried the work on and Vincenzo Scamozzi took it further, and the three domes were built over the following decades without abandoning the original scheme.

The facade came much later and from a different world: Giuseppe Sardi added it in 1663 in full Baroque, paid for by a private bequest, and it makes no attempt to express the plan behind it. A visitor reading the front would not guess at the domes.

The church holds Titian's Annunciation and Transfiguration, the funerary monument of Caterina Cornaro -- Queen of Cyprus, who abdicated in Venice's favour -- and the tombs of three doges. On the same square stands the Scuola Grande di San Teodoro, a separate confraternity building with its own 17th-century facade.