Moments from Venice Biennale

First held in 1895 as a way to give the newly unified Kingdom of Italy a cultural showcase to rival Paris, the Biennale is now the oldest and most prestigious recurring international exhibition in the art world, alternating in most years between an art edition and an architecture edition. It runs across two main sites: the Giardini, a park of national pavilions built over the twentieth century, many of them minor architectural statements in their own right (the Austrian, Nordic, and Russian pavilions especially), and the Arsenale, the Venetian Republic's former naval shipyard, a run of cavernous brick sheds that once built the ships that made Venice a maritime power.

Budget at least a full day for each site, the Arsenale alone can take three or four hours if you're actually reading the work rather than speed-walking it. A multi-day pass is worth it if the dates allow, since trying to do both venues plus the scattered city-wide collateral events in a single day usually means shortchanging all three. Wear shoes you can stand in for hours: the Arsenale floors are unforgiving concrete, and the Giardini involves a fair amount of walking between pavilions. Treat the national pavilions themselves as part of the art, not just containers for it, several were designed by major architects specifically to represent their country's aesthetic ambitions, decades before anyone hung a single canvas inside.