Chiesa del Gesù e dei Santi Ambrogio e Andrea

The Gesù faces Piazza Matteotti, right beside the Doge's Palace, and inside almost every surface is gilded stucco or painted vault. The church was rebuilt for the Jesuits from the late 1580s on the site of the old church of Saint Ambrose, to a design by Giuseppe Valeriano, a Jesuit priest who was also a painter and architect. The money came from the sons of Agostino Pallavicino, a very rich Genoese banker.

That family brought Peter Paul Rubens into the church twice. In 1605, while the young Flemish painter was working in Italy, Marcello Pallavicino commissioned The Circumcision for the high altar, a canvas nearly five metres tall that still stands there between two black marble columns. About 15 years later a second Rubens arrived, the Miracles of Saint Ignatius, paid for under the will of Nicolò Pallavicino and placed in the chapel of Saint Ignatius in the left transept. It shows the founder of the Jesuits at an altar as the possessed and the sick are healed before him.

The church also holds an Assumption by Guido Reni, the Bolognese painter. In May 2026 the Circumcision was briefly lifted down so that sensors could be fitted to track temperature and humidity ahead of its restoration, and it was back in its niche the same evening.