Museo Storico Navale

Maritime madness spans four storeys and 42 rooms at this museum of Venice’s seafaring history, featuring full-scale boats including the ducal barge, Peggy Guggenheim’s not-so-minimalist gondola, ocean liners, and WWII battleships. Your first port of call on the ground floor are sprawling galleries of fearsome weaponry – cannons, blunderbusses, swords and sabres – with hardly any noticeable bloodstains. These big guns were rarely needed in Venice, since the shallow, difficult-to-sail lagoon itself was Venice’s best protection against invaders. Check out the 17th-century diorama maps, which show the incredible span of Venetian ports and forts across the Adriatic and Mediterranean. Among the many large-scale model sailing vessels on the 1st floor, you’ll find a model of the sumptuous bucintoro, the doge’s ceremonial barge – Napoleon’s French troops destroyed the real thing in 1798. The 2nd floor covers Italian naval history and memorabilia, from unification to the present day, and on the 3rd floor is a room especially for gondolas, including Peggy Guggenheim’s swanky gondola. A small room set above the 3rd floor is dedicated to – wait for it – Swedish naval history. The ticket also gets you entrance to the Padiglione delle Navi, near the entrance to the Arsenale. Of the many boats on display, the most eye-catching is the Scalé Reale, an early-19th-century ceremonial vessel used to ferry King Vittorio Emanuele to Piazza San Marco in 1866 when Venice joined the nascent Kingdom of Italy. The ship last set sail in 1959, when it brought the body of the Venetian Pope Pius X to rest at the Basilica di San Marco.