While Franciscan friars were laboring away on Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in San Polo, the Dominicans were similarly busy in Castello. Some say San Zanipolo, as the church here is commonly called, is better proportioned and more luminous than the Frari, and it is the only church in Venice to have benefited from the work of the glass masters of Murano. The 15th-century stained glass window near the side entrance is breathtaking for its brilliant colors and beautiful figures, made from drawings by Bartolomeo Vivarini and Gerolamo Mocetto (their signatures appear near St. Theodore). The second official church of the republic after San Marco, this is the Venetian equivalent of London's Westminster Abbey, with a great number of important people, including 25 doges, buried here. Artistic highlights include an outstanding polyptych by Giovanni Bellini (right nave, second altar), Alvise Vivarini's Christ Carrying the Cross (sacristy), and Lorenzo Lotto's Charity of St. Antonino (right transept). Don't miss the Cappella del Rosario (Rosary Chapel), off the left transept. It was built in the 16th century to commemorate the 1571 victory of Lepanto in western Greece, when Venice led a combined European fleet to defeat the Turkish navy. The chapel was devastated by a fire in 1867 and restored in the early years of the 20th century with works from other churches, among them the sumptuous Veronese ceiling paintings.

However quick your visit, be sure to see the tomb Pietro Mocenigo, to the right of the main entrance, a monument built by the ubiquitous Pietro Lombardo and his sons. Also worth seeking out is the sepulchre of Doge Michele Morosini, in the choir, which was described by Ruskin as "the richest monument of the Gothic period in Venice." Oddities include a foot of St. Catherine of Siena and an urn containing the skin of commander Marcantonio Bragadin, tortured and flayed alive by the Turks during the siege of Cyprus in 1571.