Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari

Behind a plain brick front in the San Polo district of Venice hides one of the richest interiors in Italy. The Frari, as everyone calls it, is the great Franciscan church of the city, and its tall nave holds in one space two altarpieces by Titian, a triptych by Giovanni Bellini, a wooden saint by Donatello and the tombs of doges, admirals and artists. Few churches anywhere let you stand in front of so many masterpieces still in the places they were made for.

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. Inside, a carved marble choir screen of 1475 still separates the friars' stalls from the nave, the last such screen in place in any Venetian church, and a tall brick campanile completed in 1396 rises beside the apse.

Looking down the nave, the eye is drawn through the arch of the choir screen to Titian's Assumption of the Virgin over the high altar, finished in 1518. It was his first great public commission, and its blazing reds and upward-surging figures made him the leading painter of Venice. On the left wall hangs his Pesaro Madonna, painted for the Pesaro family in the 1520s, which broke tradition by setting the Virgin off-centre on a tall stepped throne. In the sacristy, Bellini's triptych of the Madonna and Child with saints, dated 1488, glows in its original gilded frame.

Titian himself was buried here in 1576, and centuries later a grand monument was raised over his grave. Opposite stands a white marble pyramid with mourning figures, designed by Antonio Canova as a tomb for Titian and built after Canova's death by his pupils as a memorial to the sculptor himself; his heart is kept inside.

Venice, built on more than a hundred islands in its lagoon, needs little introduction: a maritime republic for over a thousand years, it filled its churches with the work of the greatest Venetian painters, and the Frari is among the finest of them.

Getting there

The Frari stands in the historic centre of Venice, in the Campo dei Frari of the San Polo district. The nearest water-bus stop is San Tomà on the Grand Canal, and Venezia Santa Lucia railway station is within walking distance across the Grand Canal by the Scalzi bridge. Venice Marco Polo Airport (VCE) is about 8 km away on the mainland shore of the lagoon, linked to the historic centre by boat and by bus to Piazzale Roma.