Venice, Italy
Basilica di San Marco · bah-ZEE-lee-ka dee san MAR-ko
Five domes, four bronze horses and eight thousand square metres of gold mosaic. It was built to hold a body taken from Egypt, and filled with what Venice carried home from Constantinople. For seven hundred years it was the private chapel of the doge.
Photo: Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You have stepped out of sunlight into a dim, warm space. As your eyes adjust, the ceiling begins to glow. Every curved surface above you is gold: domes, arches, the undersides of arches, with figures in dark robes standing on the gold as if in air. The floor under your feet rises and falls like a sea.
This church was consecrated in 1094. In China it was the Northern Song (960–1127): in the capital Kaifeng, the official Su Song had just finished a clock tower twelve metres high, driven by water.
Part of St Mark's Square.
The ticket for the church does not cover everything in it. The golden screen and the museum upstairs each cost more, and it is cheaper to buy them together at the start.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The front and the left door | Free, from the square |
| The four emperors | Free, at the outside corner |
| The entrance hall, church and floor | 10 euros |
| The golden screen | 20 euros with the church |
| The museum, the horses and the balcony | 20 euros with the church |
| Everything together | 30 euros |
| The treasury | A small extra charge at its door, when open |
In 828 two Venetian merchants came home from Alexandria in Egypt with a body they said was that of St Mark, who wrote one of the four Gospels. A city with an apostle's body ranked with Rome. Venice made Mark its patron and his winged lion its badge.
This is the third church built over the body. Its plan is a cross with four equal arms and a dome over each arm and the centre. It was copied from a church in Constantinople, the capital of the Greek-speaking Roman empire, which Venice traded with, admired and envied.
In 1204 a crusading army carried by Venetian ships sacked Constantinople. The horses over the door, the purple statues at the corner, much of the gold and enamel on the altar, and the columns of coloured marble on the front all came home in the fleet.
The mosaics took the next two hundred years. Look up, and then look down.
"It was always the cathedral of Venice." It was the doge's own chapel until 1807. The city's cathedral was a plain church at the far eastern end of the town.
"The horses outside are the ancient ones." Those are copies. The real four are indoors, upstairs, out of the salt air.
"The mosaics are painted gold." Each small cube is clear glass with a leaf of real gold sealed inside it. They are set at slightly different angles so that the surface flickers.
"The floor is uneven because it is badly kept." The church stands on wooden piles driven into mud, and the ground has settled unevenly for nine hundred years.
"It is free." Worshippers at Mass enter free by a side door. Visitors pay, and book a time.
The stops begin outside at the left end of the front, go through the entrance hall, round the church and up the stairs.
Four of the five mosaics over the doors were remade in later centuries. The one on the far left is of about 1265 and is the only one that is old. It shows the body of St Mark being carried into this church.
Look closely at the church in the picture. It has the domes and the horses. It is the oldest view of the building, made when the horses had been on it for about ten years.
Walk round to the right-hand corner, by the gate of the palace. Four men in armour, carved in dark purple stone, hold each other by the shoulder. They are the four rulers who shared the Roman empire about the year 300.
The stone is porphyry from Egypt, reserved for emperors. The group stood in Constantinople until 1204. One figure has a white foot: the original was left behind. It was dug up in Istanbul in the 1960s and is in the museum there.
Inside the door, before the church itself, is a long hall with small domes. Look straight up into the first one on the right. In three rings and twenty-six scenes it tells the making of the world, day by day, from the first light to Adam and Eve leaving the garden.
Count the angels beside the Creator in each scene. There is one on the first day, two on the second, and so on to six. The mosaic was made about 1220 and copied from a Greek picture Bible seven hundred years older.
The floor is the same age as the walls. It is made of thousands of pieces of coloured marble and glass, cut into triangles, squares and circles and fitted into patterns like the carpets Venice bought in the East.
Among the patterns are animals: peacocks, eagles, a griffin. In one panel two cocks carry a fox slung from a pole. Nobody is sure what it means.
Read the domes from the door to the altar. In the first, a dove sits on a throne at the centre and twelve rays run down to the twelve followers of Christ. Between the windows below them stand the peoples of the world in pairs, each in its own dress, hearing the message in its own language.
In the central dome Christ rises into a sky of stars, carried by four angels. Round the rim stand his mother, two angels and the twelve, with trees between them.
The gold is not a background. To the people who made it, it was the light of heaven, and the figures stand in it.
Behind the high altar, facing away from the church, is a panel of gold three metres wide and two high. It was ordered from Constantinople in 976, enlarged twice, and put in its present frame in 1345.
It carries about 250 small pictures in enamel and nearly two thousand stones: pearls, garnets, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts and rubies. The stones are polished round, not cut, because the cutting of gems had not yet been invented.
Under the altar in front of it is the stone coffin of St Mark.
A door in the right arm of the church leads to a small room with very thick walls. It was a tower of the first doge's castle. It holds cups of rock crystal, agate and coloured glass mounted in gold, made in Constantinople for emperors and taken in 1204.
Much of what the crusaders took was melted down in 1797 to pay Napoleon. These pieces survived because they were thought to be worth more as relics than as metal.
Climb the steep stair by the main door to the museum. In a room of bare brick stand four horses, a little larger than life, cast in copper and gilded. They once pulled a chariot. They are Greek or Roman work, perhaps eighteen hundred years old, and the only team of four to survive from the ancient world.
They stood over the racecourse of Constantinople. Venice took them in 1204 and set them over this door. Napoleon took them in 1797 and set them on an arch in Paris. They came back in 1815. Look at the scratches on their sides: they were made on purpose, so that the gold would not glare.
Now go out through the glass door onto the balcony. The copies stand beside you, the square is below, and the domes are at your back. This is where the doge stood to be seen.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 828 | The body said to be St Mark's reaches Venice | Tang China (618–907): Bai Juyi is fifty-six; in Baghdad the caliph's House of Wisdom is translating the Greeks |
| 1063 | The present church is begun | Northern Song China: Su Shi is twenty-six; three years before the Normans conquer England |
| 1094 | It is consecrated | Su Song's water-driven clock tower stands in Kaifeng; the First Crusade is two years off |
| 1204 | Constantinople is sacked and its treasures shipped to Venice | Southern Song (1127–1279) China (1127–1279); two years later Genghis Khan unites the Mongols |
| about 1254 | The four horses are set over the door | Marco Polo is born in Venice; the Mongols rule north China |
| 1345 | The golden screen is finished | Yuan China (1271–1368); three years before the Black Death reaches Venice |
| 1797 | Napoleon takes the horses to Paris | Qing China: the Jiaqing reign has just begun |
| 1807 | The doge's chapel becomes the cathedral of Venice | Beethoven is writing his Fifth Symphony; Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary, lands at Guangzhou |
| 2019 | The sea floods the church to a depth not seen for half a century | The year of the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Two merchants of Venice, Buono and Rustico, stole the body of St Mark from its tomb in Alexandria. To get it past the Muslim customs men at the harbour they laid it in a basket under joints of pork. The officers lifted the lid, cried out in disgust and waved the basket through.
Source: Translatio Sancti Marci (eleventh century); shown in the mosaics of the church
Long before, St Mark himself was caught in a storm and driven into the lagoon, where no city yet stood. An angel came to him and said: "Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist. Here your body shall rest." Those are the words in the book under the lion's paw.
Source: Venetian tradition, written down in the thirteenth century
When the new church was finished, no one could remember where the body had been hidden during the building. The doge and the people fasted and prayed for three days. Then a stone fell from a pillar on the right, and an arm reached out.
Source: Venetian chronicles; shown in a mosaic in the right arm of the church
When the French came to strip the church in 1797, the priests told them that the stones of the golden screen were only coloured glass. The soldiers believed it and left the screen alone.
Source: Venetian popular tradition
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The basilica's own ticket site (tickets.basilicasanmarco.it), prices and opening hours as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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