Doge's PalaceHistory & audio guide · Venice

For centuries the Doge's Palace was Venice's true political center: the place where the Republic decided, administered justice and ran one of the most sophisticated — and most control-obsessed — government machines in Europe. And its oddity is plain to see. It doesn't intimidate by brute force. It doesn't look like a fortress. White and pink marble, arcades, open galleries, delicate tracery: a power that chose to look stable and self-assured rather than violent.

It's Venetian Gothic, a style that blends European Gothic with the Byzantine and the Eastern. Since the lagoon soil wouldn't allow building tall, Venice built wide, horizontal, open. Inside worked the Great Council, the Senate and the feared Council of Ten. And one detail on the facade facing the Piazzetta: beneath two reddish columns, death sentences were announced in public.

But the interior tells the other side. Vast halls and gilded ceilings — the Maggior Consiglio, with Tintoretto's Paradise at the far end — sit beside prisons: the Piombi under the lead roof, the damp dark Pozzi, and the Bridge of Sighs that carried the condemned to confinement. Luxury and surveillance in one building. The audio walks it in two chapters.