St. Zacharias Church

This guide to St. Zacharias Church in Venice opens with the assassination of a doge ambushed at the gate just outside, one of several Venetian rulers who met violent ends near this square. It traces a devastating fire that swept the monastic complex behind the church in 1105, and follows the flooded crypt where eight early doges now lie entombed under tidal water. Upstairs, look for Giovanni Bellini's radiant altarpiece, painted in a room that has seen so much of the opposite.