Museo Correr

Napoleon mowed down a church on this spot to make way for a grand ballroom, but he didn’t have long to kick up his boots in his Ala Napoleonica – within a couple years of the building’s completion, the Austrians took over Venice. When Venice won its independence, it also gained these imperial digs with all the trimmings: ancient maps, Graeco-Roman statuary and splendid medieval paintings. Stride through these salons towards the Palazzo Ducale, and at the end you’ll reach Jacopo Sansovino’s spectacular 16th-century Libreria Nazionale Marciana, with representations of wisdom by Veronese and Titian. Temporary shows in the neoclassical ballroom on such themes as futurism and Italian architecture are hit-and-miss, but Antonio Canova’s 1777 statues of star-crossed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice are permanent scene stealers. Museum entry grants access to the Correr’s Caffè dell’Art, which offers €5 DOC (denominazione d’origine controllata) Veneto merlot in an anteroom frescoed with splendid grotesques and an emperor’s-eye view of Basilica di San Marco.