Piazza San Marco

Piazza San Marco is the primary town square of Venice, Italy.

The Piazza is the only urban space big enough to be called a piazza in Venice: the rest are campi. It was the Romantic French poet Alfred de Musset who called it the "drawing-room of Europe." It is the only great urban space in a European city where the sound is of human voices talking. Its shape was established when the Venetians filled in a narrow canal that transected it, in order to provide a suitable space for the meeting of Pope Alexander III and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

The Piazza is dominated by the Basilica of San Marco and the Doge's Palace (illustration, left below), and by the Basilica's campanile (lit. "bell tower") which stands apart from it. On July 14, 1902 the campanile collapsed, suddenly and completely, without hurting a soul or scraping the facade of San Marco. It has been rebuilt just as it always was. A little white marble loggietta at its base is to a design by Sansovino.

The South-East corner by the campanile, the Piazzetta, is open to the lagoon at the mouth of the Grand Canal. It is flanked by the Doge's Palace on the left and the Library by Jacopo Sansovino on the right. At the bank are the two columns of the patrons of Venice, Byzantine loot: Saint Mark and Saint Teodoro of Amasea, "Santodaro" standing on the sacred crocodile of Egypt, who burned down the temple of Cybel for the glory of God and was martyred for it. Across the expanse of water (the Bacino di San Marco) is the the Punta della Salute to the left of Andrea Palladio's "Sant Maria della Salute." The Dogana di mare ("customs House") has given its name to every Italian customs shed, as Venice had the original Arsenal.

The rest is surrounded by historic buildings over arcades, the last of them completed, to finish off the square, under Napoleon's occupation. In the neoclassical interiors so out of character in Venice, were housed the Napoleonic governor after the fall of the Republic, then the Austrian governor, then they were reserved for the use of the kings of Italy and now the President of Italy receives in them if he is in Venice. The Procuratie Vecchie and the Procuratie Nuove (Vincenzo Scamozzi) house old, famous and expensive coffee houses, cheek-by-jowl: Gran Caffè Quadri, Caffè Florian, which opened its doors December 29, 1720, and Caffè Lavegna, in the same premises since the mid-18th century; it was Richard Wagner's favorite. Above, many a Venetian family whose Ca might be a long gondola ride from the Piazza, kept a small apartment for entertaining called a ridotto, the scenes of paintings of fashionable life by Alessandro Longhi. The ridotti were extremely fashionable in Venice. As much care and taste went into the furnishings and stuccoed and painted decor of the ridotti as were expended on the palazzi of Venice themselves.

Piazza San Marco is extremely popular with tourists, photographers and pigeons.