Venetians' desire to create a suitable monument at a place that allows for easy processional access from Piazza San Marco leads senators to select the present site from among eight potential locations.

The location is chosen partially due to its relationship to San Giorgio, San Marco and Il Redentore, with which it forms an arc.

Santa Maria della Salute, emblematic of the city's piety, is to stand adjacent to the rusticated single story customs house or Dogana da Mar, the emblem of its maritime commerce, and near the civic center of the city.

A dispute with the patriarch, owner of the church and seminary at the site, has been resolved, and razing of some of the buildings begins by 1631.

A competition is held to design the building.

Of the eleven submissions (including designs by Alessandro Varotari, Matteo Ignoli, and Berteo Belli), only two are chosen for the final round.

The architect Baldassare Longhena is selected to design the new church, which will finally be completed in 1681, the year before Longhena's death.

The other design to make it to the final round is by Antonio Smeraldi (il Fracao) and Zambattista Rubertini.

Of the proposals still extant, Belli's and Smeraldi's original plans are conventional counterreformation linear churches, resembling Palladio's Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore, while Varotari's is a sketchy geometrical abstraction.

Longhena's proposal is a concrete architectural plan, detailing the structure and costs.

The Venetian Senate votes sixty-six in favor, twenty-nine against with two abstentions to authorize the designs of the twenty-six-year-year old Longhena.

His plan for the Salute, while novel in many ways, still shows the influence of Palladian classicism and the domes of Venice.