Our next stop was San Zaccaria—only a five-minute walk to the east. It was originally designed to receive what was left of the father of John the Baptist, presented to Venice as a gesture of friendship by the Byzantine emperor in the early ninth century, and it soon became a favorite resting place for deceased doges. The wonderful creamy-white Renaissance front was clapped on six hundred years later, and so gives no clue to the much, much older building within. In the eighteenth century, it was a convent; indeed, it had the reputation of being the rowdiest convent in Venice, which in Casanova's time was saying a good deal. When you enter the church, the first revelation comes halfway up the left-hand side. Put fifty cents in the slot, the light comes on—and there before you is the loveliest picture in Venice, perhaps one of the half-dozen loveliest in the world. It's an altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, painted around 1505; the Virgin and Child, enthroned, are flanked by Saint Peter with his keys, Saint Catherine with her broken wheel, Mary Magdalene with her pot of ointment, and Saint Jerome reading the Vulgate, the Latin Bible, which he translated. At the foot of the throne sits a little angelic musician, with whom I defy anyone not to fall in love. Don't just look at this picture; watch it, for as long as the fifty cents last, and remember it forever.

Now cross the nave to the Chapel of Saint Tarasio. (You'll have to pay a bit more here, but it's worth it.) The first room has a fine Tintoretto altarpiece and, to the left, part of an earlier mosaic floor, discovered only a few years ago. Behind it is another tiny chapel, in the center of which is a magnificent golden altarpiece that couldn't be more Gothic if it tried—all cusps and crockets and pinnacles, and saints standing like statues against gold backgrounds. Now look up into the apse behind it. There, between the ribs, you will see God the Father and some more saints, but utterly different from those on the altarpiece: no longer statues but real people, of flesh and blood. These frescoes were painted by the Tuscan Andrea del Castagno in the 1440s; they mark the very first breath of the Renaissance to come to Venice, and—almost unbelievably—are just a little earlier than the Gothic masterpiece below. Here, like nowhere else in the city, you are standing precisely on the cusp where the two styles meet. Finally, go down the staircase behind you. It leads to the crypt of the earliest church on the site, dating from the ninth century. The floor is nearly always submerged in an inch or two of water nowadays, but a little brick causeway will keep you dry.

Behind San Zaccaria runs the Rio dei Greci, dominated by the alarmingly oblique campanile of the Greek Orthodox church of San Giorgio; and behind this is the smallest and most enchanting art gallery in Venice. It has only nine paintings, all in the same small room in which they have been hanging for five centuries, and all by the same man, Vittore Carpaccio. It is called the School of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni—the little guildhall of the Slav (i.e., Dalmatian) sailors. Start on the left-hand wall with the three pictures devoted to Saint George. First he fights the dragon; then he brings it, dying, to the city amid delirious celebration; finally he baptizes the king and queen. But with Carpaccio, it's the detail that counts, and the humor: the remains of the dragon's former victims and the obviously lovelorn princess in the first picture; the Oriental band puffing and banging away in the second; the discarded turban, parrot, and greyhound in the third; and in all three the spectacular clothes—what a dress designer Carpaccio would have been—and the wild, fantastic architecture.