Santa Maria della Salute

At the entrance to the Grand Canal, with a perfect sense of theatrical timing and spacing (in the City of Water, the two begin to merge) stands this magical white pavilion erected in honour of St Mary of Health. Artists have loved to paint it, including Turner.

The plague of 1630–31 was the most heinous since the Black Death of 1348, taking some 95,000 people (nearly one in three Venetians) to early graves. In October of 1630 the Senate offered the Virgin Mary a church if she would intervene and spare the city. Mary delivered, and the Senate did too, choosing in a competition the design of the 26-year-old Baldassare Longhena, who would just live to see his life’s masterpiece completed in 1682.