Venice Hotel / Venice / Piazza San Marco
Piazza San Marco
The sestiere of San Marco – 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 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.
Giardinetti Reali
Beyond the Zecca, and behind a barricade of postcard and toygondola sellers, is a small public garden – the Giardinetti Reali – created by Eugène Beauharnais on the site of the state granaries.
Libreria Sansoviniana
The Piazzetta is flanked by the Libreria Sansoviniana (or Biblioteca Marciana). The impetus to build the library came from the bequest of Cardinal Bessarion, who left his celebrated hoard of classical texts to the Republic in 1468.
Correr Museum
Many of the rooms in the Ala Napoleonica and Procuratie Nuove are now occupied by the Museo Correr, the civic museum of Venice, which is joined to the archeological museum and Sansovino’s superb library, the Libreria Sansoviniana
Procuratie Vecchie
Away to the left of the Torre dell’Orologio stretches the Procuratie Vecchie, begun around 1500, to designs by Mauro Codussi, who also designed much of the clock tower.
Torre dell’Orologio
The other tower in the Piazza, the Torre dell’Orologio (Clock Tower), was built between 1496 and 1506.
Palazzo Ducale
Architecturally, the Palazzo Ducale is a unique mixture: the style of its exterior, with its geometrically patterned stonework and continuous tracery walls, can only be called Islamicized Gothic, whereas the courtyards and much of the interior are based on Classical forms – a blending of influences that led Ruskin to declare it “the central building of the world”.
Basilica di San Marco
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 duty went about fulfilling the angelic prophecy.