Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli

The Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli stands in Venice's Cannaregio district, wedged between a canal and a street. So little space surrounds it that the church seems to rise straight out of the water. Coloured marble covers it inside and out, a finish you rarely meet in this city. Pietro Lombardo built it between 1481 and 1489, in the first flush of the Venetian Renaissance.

The church owes its existence to one painting: an icon of the Virgin that reportedly wept while on display outdoors. Public fundraising paid for the build, and in 1484 the plans grew to include a convent for St Clare's nuns. Some of the marble came from leftovers at San Marco, and some travelled from Egypt and Syria for other buildings. Against the Gothic drama that ruled Venice at the time, the building keeps a human scale. God the Father and two angels stand on the curved pediment above the facade. The round windows nod to Bramante's church designs in Milan. Tullio Lombardo, Pietro's son, cut scrollwork, fish scale patterns and even mermaids into the stone. Inside, a single nave runs under a barrel vault, its ceiling divided into fifty-two wooden panels painted with saints and prophets.

Frescoes of sibyls, ancient prophetesses, reappeared on the ceiling's spandrels during the restoration that ran from 1990 to 1997. Save Venice Inc. led the job against a strange enemy: salt in the stone, which threatened to burst. Every piece of cladding came off for a bath in tanks of distilled water before going back on the walls. Doors, bronze statues and the painted ceiling followed, and the bill reached four million dollars. The restorers even cleaned the wooden panel of the Madonna, the painting that started the whole story.