Palazzo Vendramin Calergi

Palazzo Vendramin Calergi is a major Renaissance palace on the Grand Canal, its calm, symmetrical facade among Mauro Codussi's finest works -- and the building where Richard Wagner spent his final months and died in 1883. Today it serves the Venice Casino as its winter home, with a small museum dedicated to Wagner tucked inside the same walls.

Most of this building is a working casino, not a heritage site with a gaming room attached. Visiting it means gambling, or at least paying the entry that includes gaming credit, and that is worth deciding on deliberately rather than as a way of getting inside a Codussi palace.

The Wagner Museum runs on appointments made with volunteers rather than a ticketed staff, and a booked slot not taken up costs someone their Saturday morning. Cancel if plans change.

The palace is the Casino's winter home; in summer the operation moves to Ca' Vendramin's mainland site, so the building's public accessibility varies through the year in a way no signage explains.

Seeing the facade from the water costs a vaporetto fare and asks nothing of the building. For most visitors that is the whole of what this palace has to offer, and it is genuinely enough.

The Wagner Museum is open to the public on Saturday mornings by appointment only. The Casino di Venezia, which occupies the rest of the building, is open to adults 18 and over with valid ID, for a paid entry that includes gaming credit; a "respectable" dress code applies. The palace is a short walk from the San Marcuola vaporetto stop, sometimes labeled "Casino" on the line 1 and 2 routes.