Venice - St Marks Square Piazza di San Marco

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.