Frari Basilica

Frari Basilica tickets: which one to buy

A modest ticket is bought at the door or online, and the Chorus Pass, which covers about fifteen Venetian churches including this one, costs roughly the price of three separate entries and is the sensible buy for anyone staying more than a day. Audio guides are rented inside. Guided tours of San Polo include the Frari and cost several times the ticket; they earn it here, because the church is a museum of Venetian sculpture and painting with almost no labels.

The basilica is a ten-minute walk from the Rialto and five from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, whose Tintoretto cycle is the natural companion and has its own ticket. Entry is free during mass. Photography without flash is allowed, which is unusual among the paying churches of Venice. The Chorus Pass is valid for a year and includes San Polo, Santo Stefano and the Madonna dell'Orto, all of which are worth the walk.

Visiting Frari Basilica: what to see

The Franciscans began the present brick church in 1250 and finished it in the fifteenth century, and it is one of the three great Gothic churches of Venice, plain outside and crowded inside with the tombs of doges, generals and artists. Titian's Assumption of the Virgin of 1518 hangs over the high altar, framed by the choir screen so that the red-robed Virgin rises into gold as you walk up the nave; it is the painting that made his reputation.

His Pesaro Madonna in the left aisle moved the Virgin off the centre of the composition for the first time. Donatello carved the wooden St John the Baptist in 1438. Monteverdi is buried here, as is Titian himself, under a nineteenth-century monument opposite the extraordinary pyramid tomb of Canova, designed by the sculptor for someone else and used for his own heart. The choir stalls of 1468, carved for the friars and still in place in the middle of the nave, are the only complete medieval choir left in Venice.

Frari Basilica opening hours and the best time to go

Open Monday to Saturday from mid-morning to evening and Sunday afternoons, closing to visitors during mass. Venice is busiest from April to October and around Carnival, but the Frari is quieter than San Marco at any hour, and the middle of the morning is perfectly bearable. The Assumption is lit by the apse windows and reads best in the middle of the day.

Acqua alta in autumn and winter rarely reaches the floor here, which sits slightly higher than much of the city. Dress code is enforced, shoulders and knees covered. Allow an hour, ninety minutes if the monuments hold you. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco across the square and San Pantalon with its enormous painted ceiling are both within two minutes. The campo outside has one of the few benches in the district and a bakery that has been there for decades.