Venice - St Marks Square

(Local Name: Piazza di San Marco) St Mark's Square, "la Piazza" for short, is Venice on parade, the point around which Venetian life revolves. Considered one of the finest squares in the world, it conveys a perfect impression of the city's former greatness since round it are grouped the buildings on which were centered the civic and religious life of the Republic. Surrounded on three sides by the arcades of public buildings - the Procuratie Vecchie (north), the Ala Napoleonica (west) and the Procuratie Nuove (south) - the integrated beauty of this unique square is rounded off by the domes and arches of the Basilica di San Marco (east) and the slender, soaring Campanile. The square, paved with trachyte, is completely open without a single monument or roadway to detract from the unbroken architectural unity. The only traffic is the visitors (and the famous pigeons).

The square becomes narrower as it approaches the Ala Napoleonica, which gives it considerable greater depth: over an average length of 175m/574ft it narrows from a width of 82m/269ft) at the Basilica to 56.6m/185.5ft at the other end.

Originally the Piazza was full of fruit trees with a canal running across it. The completion of the Basilica and the enlargement of the Palazzo Ducale also saw a start made on landscaping the square. First came the Campanile (begun in 912 and completed in the 12th century, followed in 1204 by the Procuratie Vecchie; the fruit trees disappeared, the canal was filled in and in 1267 the square covered with paving slabs. 1583 saw the building of the Procuratie Nuove. Having been paved with marble in 1735 (the big white squares originally marked the sites where the individual craftsmen's guilds were allowed to erect their market stalls), the square finally acquired its present aspect with the building of the Napoleonic Wing.

Until the fall of the Republic the Piazza di San Marco was a "market-place". Today it is a place to see and be seen, to stroll in or to sit and listen to the bands playing at the square's world-famous cafes.

The pigeons of San Marco are also part of the picture. Fed at the public charge (although there are no set feeding-times), they are the acknowledged protégés of the Venetians. Whatever their origins - whether descended from the birds brought to the lagoon in the fifth century by the early Venetians on their flight from Attila, or from those set free by the Doges each Palm Sunday, or even from the carrier pigeons that brought the news of the capture of Constantinople in 1204 - they are an institution.