The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Veneto
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Veneto are St Mark's Campanile, St Mark's Basilica and San Michele Cemetery, Venice. The list covers 10 sacred places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Veneto's sacred places draw on two worlds at once. Venice traded with Byzantium for centuries and brought back gold mosaics, marbles and relics, while Padua and the mainland cities were at the heart of Italian painting from Giotto onwards. Between the lagoon and the foothills of the Alps, the region also kept its sanctuaries in places of striking natural drama.
St Mark's Basilica, built to hold the relics of the evangelist, is a Byzantine church of five domes whose interior glows with gold mosaics. Santa Maria della Salute, raised by Baldassare Longhena as a thanksgiving for the end of the plague of 1630, guards the entrance to the Grand Canal. On the island of Torcello, the cathedral founded in the seventh century keeps a vast mosaic of the Last Judgment, and San Michele, the cemetery island, holds the graves of Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Ezra Pound among its cypresses.
In Padua, the Scrovegni Chapel holds Giotto's fresco cycle from the early fourteenth century, a turning point in Western painting. Near Asolo, Carlo Scarpa's Brion tomb turns a family memorial into a modern garden of concrete, water and light. Above the Adige valley, the Madonna della Corona sanctuary is built into a sheer cliff of Monte Baldo.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | St Mark's Campanile | Bell tower | |
| 2 | St Mark's Basilica | Cathedral | |
| 3 | San Michele Cemetery, Venice | Cemetery | |
| 4 | Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua | Pilgrimage site | |
| 5 | Madonna della Corona Sanctuary (Spiazzi) | Pilgrimage site | |
| 6 | Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari | Church building | |
| 7 | Scrovegni Chapel | Church building | |
| 8 | Santa Maria della Salute | Church building | |
| 9 | Brion tomb | Mausoleum | |
| 10 | Torcello Cathedral | Cathedral |
01 St Mark's Campanile
Campanile di San Marco
Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.339° E
Image by hadzaj from Pixabay The form is almost severe: a plain square shaft of brick with shallow pilaster strips, then an arcaded belfry of white Istrian stone, an attic and a pyramidal spire. The attic carries reliefs that reward a close look through binoculars or from the top: two figures of Venice personified as Justice, enthroned between lions with sword and scales, and two winged lions of Saint Mark.
02 St Mark's Basilica
Basilica di San Marco
Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay The most famous spoils are the four gilded bronze horses from the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the only surviving team of horses from classical antiquity. The originals have been kept inside since 1974, with copies on the balcony above the central portal. On the south side, embedded in the corner of the treasury, stands the porphyry group of the Four Tetrarchs, another trophy of 1204.
Did you know? The collars on the horses were added to hide where their heads had been cut off so they could be shipped from Constantinople in 1204.
03 San Michele Cemetery, Venice
San Michele
Italy · 1.3 km from Venice45.447° N 12.347° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay At the landing stands San Michele in Isola, designed by Mauro Codussi and begun in 1469, usually counted as the first Renaissance church in Venice. Its white Istrian stone facade, with a curved crown and crisp classical order, looks almost austere after the Gothic lace elsewhere in the city, and it set a pattern Venetian architects followed for decades.
Did you know? The graves range from the composer Luigi Nono to the football manager Helenio Herrera and the jewellery designer Jean Schlumberger.
04 Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua
Basilica di Sant'Antonio di Padova
Italy · 34.3 km from Venice45.401° N 11.881° E
Image by sferrario1968 from Pixabay Donatello also made the high altar: a bronze Madonna and Child with six saints and four reliefs of the saint's miracles, crowded with figures and deep perspective. Nearby stands Andrea Briosco's Easter candelabrum of 1515, reckoned his masterpiece.
05 Madonna della Corona Sanctuary (Spiazzi)
Santuario della Madonna della Corona
Italy · 25.5 km from Verona45.650° N 10.856° E
Misasar · CC BY-SA 4.0 Religious life on this ledge is old. Hermits attached to the abbey of San Zeno in Verona were living in the Baldo area around the year 1000, and by the 13th century there was a small monastery with a chapel to St Mary of Montebaldo. The object of veneration is a Pietà carved in local stone, only 70 centimetres high, with an inscription naming Lodovicus de Castrobarco and the year 1432.
Did you know? A small hexagonal temple marks the spot where, according to tradition, the statue was found on the rock.
06 Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.437° N 12.326° E
Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The friars were given land here in the 1230s. Their first church soon proved too small, and the present building was begun in the first half of the 14th century and took more than a hundred years to finish; it was consecrated in 1492 to the Assumption of the Virgin. It is a fine example of Venetian Gothic: walls of red brick, white Istrian stone for the details, round columns and tall ribbed vaults rather than a dome.
Did you know? Giovanni Bellini's triptych of the Madonna and Child, dated 1488, remains in its original carved frame in the sacristy.
07 Scrovegni Chapel
Cappella degli Scrovegni
Italy · 34.3 km from Venice45.412° N 11.880° E
Andrea Piroddi · CC BY-SA 3.0 The chapel was commissioned by Enrico Scrovegni, a wealthy Paduan, on land he bought in February 1300 beside the remains of the city's Roman arena, where his family palace also stood; the palace was pulled down in 1827. Enrico's father Reginaldo, a moneylender, is placed by Dante among the usurers in the Inferno, and historians still debate whether the chapel was meant in part as atonement.
Did you know? A motet by the composer Marchetto da Padova seems to have been written for the chapel's dedication on 25 March 1305.
08 Santa Maria della Salute
Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute
Italy · 0.9 km from Venice45.431° N 12.335° E
Image by EdiHoch from Pixabay The site is the tip of Dorsoduro, beside the old customs house of the Punta della Dogana, where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca canal and the lagoon opens up. To hold the heavy masonry on that shifting ground, the church stands on a dense forest of oak and fir piles driven into the mud, and is built of Istrian stone and marmorino.
Did you know? The church measures about 70 metres in length and 47 metres in width, with eight chapels radiating from the central rotunda.
09 Brion tomb
Memoriale Brion
Italy · 27 km from Treviso45.751° N 11.913° E
Filippo Poli · CC BY-SA 4.0 The commission came in 1969 from Onorina Tomasin-Brion, widow of Giuseppe Brion, founder of the electronics company Brionvega, who wanted a memorial for her husband. Scarpa worked on it from 1969 until his death in 1978. The visitor enters through a propylaeum whose wall is pierced by two interlocking circles, edged in blue and pink mosaic, a form that recalls the vesica piscis, a motif Scarpa used again and again.
Did you know? Murano glass tiles, ebony inlays, brass and bronze are set directly into the concrete, so the raw walls carry fine craftsman's detail.
10 Torcello Cathedral
Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta
Italy · 9.3 km from Venice45.498° N 12.419° E
Emmanuel Cruvelier · Public domain Torcello was settled by refugees from the Roman city of Altinum, which was destroyed in the 5th century, and it grew into a busy trading community long before Venice rose to dominance; at its peak, in the 10th century, its population is usually estimated at around 20,000. An inscription records the founding of the church in 639 under the exarch Isaac of Ravenna.
Did you know? In the Last Judgement mosaic Satan sits enthroned in hell, holding the Antichrist on his lap.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful sacred places in Veneto?
- On our list, St Mark's Campanile ranks first, followed by St Mark's Basilica and San Michele Cemetery, Venice.
- Why was Santa Maria della Salute built?
- The Venetian Republic vowed to build it during the plague of 1630, dedicating it to the Virgin as protector of the city's health. Baldassare Longhena designed the octagonal domed church at the mouth of the Grand Canal.
- What is in the Scrovegni Chapel?
- The chapel in Padua is covered with frescoes by Giotto, painted in the early fourteenth century, showing the lives of the Virgin and Christ and a Last Judgment under a starry blue vault.
- Who is buried on San Michele in Venice?
- The island cemetery holds the graves of Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Ezra Pound and Joseph Brodsky, among many Venetians.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Veneto?
- The list covers 10 sacred places.