Santa Maria della Salute

No building defines the Venetian skyline more than the great white dome at the mouth of the Grand Canal. Santa Maria della Salute was born of catastrophe: the plague of 1630 killed around 46,000 people in Venice itself, and in October that year the Senate vowed to raise a church to the Virgin as Our Lady of Health if the city were spared. A competition followed, won by the 26-year-old Baldassare Longhena with a design he described as a rotunda of new invention, never before built in Venice, shaped like a crown for the Virgin. Work began in 1631 and occupied him for the rest of his life; he died in 1682, five years before the church was consecrated in November 1687.

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. Longhena's plan is an octagon wrapped around a central space, with a large dome over the rotunda and a smaller one over the chancel, and two slender bell towers behind. The feature everyone remembers are the orecchioni, the 'big ears': huge spiral volutes at the ends of the buttresses around the drum, each topped by a statue. They carry the dome down to the façades and make the whole mass look lighter than it is; more than a hundred statues crowd the exterior, among them Judith with the head of Holofernes, the Evangelists and the prophets.

Inside, the effect is calm after the drama of the exterior: white marble, architecture picked out in contrasting stone, and light falling from the high windows of the dome. There, Josse de Corte's sculptural group shows the Queen of Heaven driving the plague away from Venice, and framed at its centre is a Byzantine icon of the Virgin brought from Heraklion in 1669, when the city fell to the Ottomans. The sacristy is a small gallery in its own right, with Tintoretto's Marriage at Cana and a series of works by Titian.

The vow is still honoured. Every year on 21 November, for the Festa della Salute, a temporary pontoon bridge is laid across the Grand Canal and Venetians walk over it to light candles in the church. It is also the building painters kept returning to - Canaletto, Turner and Monet all set it at the centre of their views of the canal.

Getting there

The basilica stands in Venice's Dorsoduro district, less than a kilometre from the heart of the city across the Grand Canal from San Marco. Venice Marco Polo Airport (VCE) lies about 8 km away across the lagoon. The church is reached on foot through Dorsoduro or by vaporetto line 1 to the Salute stop.