St Mark’s Basilica

St Mark's Basilica tickets: which one to buy

Entry to the basilica costs a few euros and the queue along the arcade can take an hour in season, which makes the small booking fee for a timed slot the best money you will spend in Venice. Three add-ons are sold inside and each is worth considering. The Pala d'Oro, the gold and enamel altarpiece behind the high altar, needs its own small ticket. The treasury, a vaulted room of Byzantine reliquaries looted in 1204, needs another. The museum upstairs includes the loggia and the four bronze horses, and it opens onto the terrace above the main door, which looks straight down the square;

this is the one to choose if you take only one. Guided tours cost several times the basic entry and add both the skip-the-line slot and an explanation of the mosaics, which is useful because the iconography is dense and unlabelled. After-hours tours, run when the church is closed to the public, are expensive but let you see the mosaics lit with the floor lights on and nobody moving past you. The campanile in the square is a separate building with its own ticket and a lift.

Visiting St Mark's Basilica: what to see

The present church was begun around 1063, the third on the site, modelled on the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople and built as the private chapel of the Doge rather than as a cathedral, which it became only in 1807. The facades are a collage of plunder: columns, reliefs and coloured marbles stripped from Byzantine buildings after the Fourth Crusade, including the horses over the door.

Inside, some 8,000 square metres of gold-ground mosaic cover the domes and vaults, laid over seven centuries, telling the story of Mark's body being smuggled out of Alexandria in a barrel of pork to keep Muslim inspectors away. The floor is a wavy pavement of marble geometry, buckled by the settling of the foundations. Behind the altar the Pala d'Oro carries about two thousand gems and 250 enamel panels. Visits follow a marked one-way route and take twenty minutes at a walk, an hour if you stop.

St Mark's Basilica opening hours and the best time to go

The basilica opens mid-morning on weekdays and later on Sundays, closing in the late afternoon; the last entry is half an hour before. Mass times block the nave to visitors. The mosaics need light to work, and the church turns on the full illumination for limited periods during the day, usually around the middle of the day and always for services, which is when the gold actually glows; ask at the door for the schedule.

Acqua alta, the high-water flooding, reaches the narthex in autumn and winter and raised walkways are laid inside. Dress code is strictly applied: knees and shoulders covered, no hats. Bags larger than a small handbag are refused at the door and must be left at the free deposit on the nearby Calle San Basso, which adds fifteen minutes to the visit, so travel light. Photography is forbidden inside. The square is busiest between eleven and four, when the cruise groups pass through.