Peggy Guggenheim Collection

After the Accademia, this is the most visited museum in Venice, and deservedly so; it’s the freshest breath of air in Doge City. The museum is one of the oddballs on the Grand Canal, in the ranch-style Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, better known as the Palazzo Non Finito (begun in 1749 and never finished past the first floor).

From 1910 it was the stage for the antics of the Marchesa Casati of Milan, glittering queen of decadence and folly, the Futurists’ Gioconda, who held parties here with an artificial lilac jungle populated by apes, ocelots, Afghan hounds, and torch-bearing naked slaves painted with gold (who later died), until 1919 when she packed her bags to become the mistress of Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Thirty years later the Palazzo Non Finito was purchased by another arty lady, American copper heiress Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), who had an irresistible smile and an irrepressible love for modern art, even marrying into it (her second husband was Max Ernst). She had been invited to show her fabled New York collection of art at the 1948 Biennale (the first after the Second World War) and then filled this palace with her treasures. When she died, left it all to the Guggenheim Foundation in New York.