Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The unfinished, one-storey Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was the home of eccentric American millionairess Peggy Guggenheim and today still houses her extraordinary collection of modern art.

Guggenheim brought her collection of mainly surrealist and modernist works to Venice in 1949 purchasing the charming Grand Canal-side palazzo to house it and herself. She died here in 1979 aged 81.

From Picasso to Pollock, Brancusi to Max Ernst, Guggenheim’s brilliantly unfailing eye picked out the best of the 20th-century avant garde; this collection gives the city a modernist stamp it would otherwise have lacked.

Gazing across the Grand Canal, with the rambling sculpture garden overlooked by the café, there are few more alluring spots in Venice.