The sestiere of St Mark’s Square – a rectangle smaller than 1000m by 500m – has been the nucleus of Venice from the start of the city’s existence. When its founders decamped from the coastal town of Malamocco to settle on the safer islands of the inner lagoon, the area now known as the Piazza San Marco or St. Mark’s Square was where the first rulers built their citadel – the Palazzo Ducale – and it was here that they established their most important church – the Basilica di San Marco. Over the succeeding centuries the Basilica evolved into the most ostentatiously rich church in Christendom, and the Palazzo Ducale grew to accommodate and celebrate a system of government that endured for longer than any other republican regime in Europe. Meanwhile, the setting for these two great edifices developed into a public space so dignified that no other square in the city was thought fit to bear the name “piazza” – all other Venetian squares are campi or campielli.

Nowadays the Piazza is what keeps the city solvent:the plushest hotels are concentrated in the San Marco sestiere; the most elegant and exorbitant cafés spill out onto the pavement from the Piazza’s arcades; the most extravagantly priced seafood is served in this area’s restaurants; and the swankiest shops in Venice line the Piazza and the streets radiating from it.

The Basilica di San Marco
Open to tourists Mon–Sat 9.30am–5.30pm, Sun 2–4pm, though the Loggia dei Cavalli is open Sun morning. All over Venice you see images of the lion of St Mark holding a book on which is carved the text “Pax tibi, Marce evangelista meus. Hic requiescet corpus tuum” (“Peace be with you Mark,my Evangelist. Here shall your body rest”).These supposedly are the words with which St Mark was greeted by an angel who appeared to him on the night he took shelter in the lagoon on his way back to Rome.Having thus assured themselves of the sacred ordination of their city, the first Venetians duly went about fulfilling the angelic prophecy. In 828 two merchants stole the body of St Mark from its tomb in Alexandria and brought it back to Venice. Work began immediately on a shrine to house him, and the Basilica di San Marco was consecrated in 832. The amazing church you see today is essentially the version built in 1063–94, embellished in the succeeding centuries.

The marble-clad exterior is adorned with numerous pieces of ancient stonework, but a couple of features warrant special
attention: the Romanesque carvings of the arches of the central doorway; and the group of porphyry figures set into the
wall on the waterfront side – known as the Tetrarchs, in all likelihood a fourth-century Egyptian work depicting
Diocletian and the three colleagues with whom he ruled the unravelling Roman Empire.

The real horses of San Marco are inside the church – the four outside are modern replicas. On the main facade, the only ancient mosaic to survive is The Arrival of the Body of st marks square, above the Porta di Sant’Alipio, made around 1260, it features the earliest known image of the Basilica.