San Pietro di Castello Site Features

The facade is Palladio's first Venetian commission, taken in 1558 -- and it is not quite Palladio's building. His patron died before the work went ahead, and Francesco Smeraldi built it to a modified design between 1594 and 1596, so what stands is a version of the scheme rather than the scheme itself. It is the point at which Palladio's temple-front idea entered Venice, before he perfected it at San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore.

The campanile stands apart from the church and is Mauro Codussi's, rebuilt in the 1480s in white Istrian stone -- among the first fully Renaissance structures in the city, and now leaning conspicuously.

Inside, Baldassarre Longhena added the Baroque Vendramin Chapel and the high altar, so the building carries three of the major Venetian architects in sequence: Codussi's tower, Palladio's front, Longhena's chapel.

The single most extraordinary object is not architecture at all. The so-called Throne of St Peter, in the right aisle, is a 13th-century seat assembled from a much older Islamic funerary stele, still carved with Kufic Arabic quoting the Qur'an. It most likely came from the Fatimid world via Byzantium after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 -- a Muslim gravestone rebuilt as a Christian bishop's chair, sitting in what was for centuries Venice's cathedral.

The campanile, rebuilt by Codussi in the 1480s from white Istrian stone, leans noticeably and remains one of Venice's more precarious bell towers. Inside, look for the Throne of St. Peter in the right aisle -- its Arabic Kufic inscriptions still visible on what was once an Islamic funerary stele -- alongside Veronese's and Giordano's altarpieces and Longhena's Baroque Vendramin Chapel.

San Pietro stands on its own small island at the far eastern end of Castello, joined to the rest of the city by a bridge, beyond the Arsenale and past the Biennale gardens.

The distance is the historical point. Venice put its cathedral and its Patriarch at the opposite end of the city from the Doge's Palace, and kept St Mark's -- the doge's private chapel -- at the centre. The city's ecclesiastical power and its political power were deliberately not housed together, and the map still shows it.

The setting is nothing like the rest of Venice. There is grass in front of the church, boats pulled up on the bank, washing lines between houses, and a campo that feels like a village green rather than a city square.

Beyond the island the lagoon opens out toward Sant'Elena and the northern water. This is the eastern edge of the city, and it is quiet in a way that no amount of walking in the centre will produce.

From the Biennale Giardini it is about ten minutes on foot, which is the natural approach.