Discover Santa Maria della Salute

Baldassare Longhena won the commission at 26 with a design unlike any other major Venetian church: an octagonal plan rather than the usual Latin cross, built in Istrian stone and marmorino, with a pair of bell towers set behind the main volume.

The octagon was a structural argument as much as an aesthetic one. A centralised plan spread the building's enormous weight evenly across ground that could not take it -- the church rests on more than a million timber piles driven into the lagoon mud -- and the great scrolled buttresses ringing the drum, often read as pure Baroque ornament, are what actually transmit the dome's outward thrust down into that foundation.

The facade is organised as a triumphal arch, with statues of Saint George, Saint Theodore, and the Evangelists across it and the Virgin at the apex of the pediment, positioned to be legible from across the water rather than from close up.

Inside, the octagon repeats: eight radiating chapels ring a central space, with three altars carrying scenes from the life of the Virgin. The high altar holds a Byzantine Madonna and Child of the 12th or 13th century, brought from Candia -- now Heraklion, on Crete -- when the city fell to the Ottomans in 1669.