Venice in a day

St Mark's Basilica

It was built to house the body of St Mark, which two Venetian merchants stole in Alexandria in 828 and smuggled out of Egypt hidden under pork so that the Muslim guards wouldn’t search the cargo. The present basilica dates from the late eleventh century and its interior is covered by some eight thousand square metres of mosaic on a gold ground.

The four bronze horses on the façade are loot: taken from Constantinople in the sack of 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, which Venice diverted against a Christian city for commercial reasons. Those outside are copies. The originals are inside, in the museum, and are among the few ancient quadrigas that survive.

Inside too is the Pala d’Oro, a Byzantine altarpiece with thousands of precious stones. The queue is long almost always: going first thing or with a booking changes the whole morning.

The Doge’s Palace and the Bridge of Sighs

The Doge’s Palace housed the Venetian Republic’s government for nearly a thousand years: not the doge’s house but the entire state. The Great Council chamber, the courts, the prisons.

The Sala del Maggior Consiglio holds one of the largest canvases in the world, Tintoretto’s “Paradise”, and a frieze of the doges’ portraits in which one is covered by a black cloth: Marino Falier, executed for treason in 1355 and erased from the official record.

The Bridge of Sighs, from 1600, connects the interrogation rooms with the new prisons. The name is Romantic and nineteenth-century: the idea that prisoners sighed at their last sight of the lagoon through its small windows. By then it was barely used for serious convicts. You cross it from the inside on the palace visit, which is the only way to see it from within.

Rialto and the Grand Canal

The Rialto concentrated the Republic’s trade and finance (the banks, the market and the insurers were here) and the present stone bridge was finished in 1591 after several wooden predecessors collapsed, one of them under the weight of a crowd watching a parade. The design competed with proposals by Michelangelo and Palladio, and was won by an engineer with an almost perfect name for the job: Antonio da Ponte.

The fish market beside it still works in the mornings and is one of the few things in the centre still meant for Venetians.

And to see the whole Grand Canal without paying for a gondola, there’s the number 1 vaporetto: it runs the full curve stopping everywhere, and on an ordinary ticket it’s the best cheap view in the city.

Dorsoduro, to get away

Crossing the Grand Canal by the Accademia bridge takes you to Dorsoduro, which has the university, two major museums (the Gallerie dell’Accademia, with Venetian painting, and the Peggy Guggenheim collection of twentieth-century art in the palace where she lived) and a notably lower density of tourists. At the end of the district, on the customs point, stands the basilica of the Salute, raised as the city’s vow after the plague of 1630-31, which killed nearly a third of the population. From there you see the mouth of the Grand Canal, St Mark’s opposite and the island of San Giorgio. It’s the best place in Venice to watch the evening come in, and it costs nothing.