Discover San Pietro di Castello

The facade is Palladio's first Venetian commission, taken in 1558 -- and it is not quite Palladio's building. His patron died before the work went ahead, and Francesco Smeraldi built it to a modified design between 1594 and 1596, so what stands is a version of the scheme rather than the scheme itself. It is the point at which Palladio's temple-front idea entered Venice, before he perfected it at San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore.

The campanile stands apart from the church and is Mauro Codussi's, rebuilt in the 1480s in white Istrian stone -- among the first fully Renaissance structures in the city, and now leaning conspicuously.

Inside, Baldassarre Longhena added the Baroque Vendramin Chapel and the high altar, so the building carries three of the major Venetian architects in sequence: Codussi's tower, Palladio's front, Longhena's chapel.

The single most extraordinary object is not architecture at all. The so-called Throne of St Peter, in the right aisle, is a 13th-century seat assembled from a much older Islamic funerary stele, still carved with Kufic Arabic quoting the Qur'an. It most likely came from the Fatimid world via Byzantium after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 -- a Muslim gravestone rebuilt as a Christian bishop's chair, sitting in what was for centuries Venice's cathedral.