San Giorgio Monastery

At the far end of the monks' refectory on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore hangs Paolo Veronese's Wedding at Cana, a banquet crowded with more than a hundred figures. Look closely and you can see faint horizontal seams across it, faithfully reproduced. The original was painted for this wall in 1562 and 1563, removed by French troops in September 1797 and cut into sections for the journey to Paris, where it still hangs in the Louvre. On 11 September 2007, exactly 210 years later, a full-size facsimile made by the Madrid workshop Factum Arte was installed in its place.

The refectory is one of the spaces Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance architect, designed for this Benedictine monastery facing St Mark's across the water. After Napoleon's government suppressed it in 1806, the buildings spent well over a century in military use. In 1951 the industrialist Vittorio Cini restored them and set up the Giorgio Cini Foundation in memory of his son, and the foundation still runs the cloisters and exhibitions today.

Next door, in Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the monks' late commissions to Jacopo Tintoretto remain where he left them. His Last Supper beside the high altar sends the table running away from you on a steep diagonal, and his Entombment, finished months before his death in 1594, still stands on the altar of the monks' chapel of the dead.