Gallerie dell'Accademia

This is the place to see Venetian painting where it was made. The Gallerie dell'Accademia gathers the greatest collection of it anywhere, five centuries of Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and Tiepolo, all within sight of the canals and light that shaped their colour.

The buildings were religious before they held art. The complex grew out of the Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Carita, a medieval lay confraternity, and its church and monastery beside the Grand Canal. After Napoleon suppressed such institutions around 1800, the rooms were turned into an academy of fine arts and its gallery.

The pictures reward slow looking. Giorgione's small 'Tempest', from around 1508, sets a woman nursing a child and a soldier in a landscape under a bolt of lightning, and scholars have never agreed what it means. Carpaccio's storytelling cycles unroll across whole walls. The gallery also owns Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square, the 'Vitruvian Man', though it is so fragile that it comes out only rarely, kept in the dark between showings.