Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale), Venice

The Palazzo Ducale, or Doge's Palace, on Piazza San Marco in Venice was for roughly a thousand years the seat of the Venetian Republic — the residence of the Doge, the meeting place of its governing councils, and the home of its law courts and prisons. A palace stood on the site from the 9th century, but the building visible today is largely the result of 14th- to 16th-century reconstruction following a series of devastating fires, most notably those of 1483, 1574, and 1577. Its façades of pink Verona marble laid over white Istrian stone, set above a double tier of pointed arches and tracery, are the defining image of Venetian Gothic architecture, while the interior courtyards and staircases — including Antonio Rizzo's Scala dei Giganti — introduce Renaissance forms. Inside, a sequence of state rooms displays the propaganda of the Republic in paint and gilt: the Sala del Collegio and Sala del Senato carry ceilings by Veronese and his contemporaries, and the vast Sala del Maggior Consiglio is dominated by Tintoretto's 'Paradiso', at roughly 22 by 7 metres one of the largest oil paintings on canvas in the world, beneath a frieze of the first seventy-six doges. The visit also takes in the Doge's Apartments, the armoury, the institutional rooms of the feared Council of Ten, and the marble denunciation slots known as the Bocche di Leone. From the palace the enclosed Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri), built around 1600, leads to the Prigioni Nuove, the new prisons across the canal. The optional Secret Itineraries tour (Itinerari Segreti) opens the administrative warren behind the public rooms, including the chancery and the leaded attic cells known as the Piombi, from which Casanova famously escaped in 1756. Carefully conserved as a museum since the fall of the Republic in 1797, the Palazzo Ducale today preserves the architecture, art, and machinery of Venetian government in a single building at the heart of the city.