Piazza San Marco

Where it sits. Piazza San Marco is the civic and ceremonial centre of Venice, at the southern edge of the historic city where the Grand Canal opens into the Bacino di San Marco. It is the only open space in Venice called a piazza; every other square is a campo or a campiello. The plan is a trapezoid roughly 175 metres long, widening from the west towards the basilica, with the smaller Piazzetta running south from it to the waterfront between the Doge's Palace and the Marciana library, framed at the lagoon end by two granite columns brought from the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century. It is also the lowest ground in the city, which is why it is the first place to flood and the standard image of acqua alta.

The story behind it. The square took its present shape in 1177, when an earlier canal crossing it was filled in for a meeting between Pope Alexander III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. St Mark's Basilica, consecrated in 1094, is the third church on the site and was the Doge's private chapel until 1807; its five domes, Greek-cross plan and 8,000 square metres of gold-ground mosaic are Byzantine in conception, and the four bronze horses on the loggia were looted from Constantinople in 1204. The Campanile stands 98.6 metres high and is a faithful 1912 rebuild of the tower that collapsed without warning on 14 July 1902, killing no one but the caretaker's cat. Along the north side run the Procuratie Vecchie, along the south the Procuratie Nuove begun by Vincenzo Scamozzi, and closing the west end the Ala Napoleonica of 1810, which swept away a church and now holds the Museo Correr. Mauro Codussi's Torre dell'Orologio of 1499 shows the hours, the moon and the zodiac, with two bronze Moors striking the bell.

On screen. The square supplies one of the most widely recognised comic beats in the Bond series. In Moonraker (1979), Roger Moore's gondola, having survived a knife attack from a funeral barge on the canals, converts into a hovercraft and glides straight across Piazza San Marco between the crowds and the cafe tables, prompting a Venetian to spill his wine and a pigeon to perform an unmistakable double take. The craft was a genuine working hovercraft built onto a gondola hull and driven through the real square, and the film goes on to hide Drax's nerve-gas laboratory behind a Venetian glassworks, with a fight staged among the display cases. Venice has served the series repeatedly: From Russia with Love (1963) ends here, and Casino Royale (2006) sails Bond and Vesper into the Bacino di San Marco past the Piazzetta on their way to the film's fatal final act.

What you actually see today. Three things are worth queueing for and one is not. The basilica interior repays a timed ticket, particularly for the Pala d'Oro, a gold and enamel altarpiece studded with thousands of gems, and for the loggia, which gives you the horses at close range and the square from above. The Campanile lift gives the widest view in Venice, out over the lagoon to the Lido and, on clear winter days, to the Alps. The Doge's Palace and its Bridge of Sighs anchor the Piazzetta. The thing not worth it, on most days, is a table at Caffè Florian, open since 1720 and charging accordingly, though the surcharge does buy a live orchestra and a genuinely three-hundred-year-old room. Feeding the pigeons has been banned since 2008. On the Piazzetta side, Jacopo Sansovino's Biblioteca Marciana, built between 1537 and 1588 and praised by Palladio as the finest building since antiquity, holds the manuscript collection Cardinal Bessarion left to Venice in 1468; its reading rooms and the adjoining Museo Correr are covered by the same combined ticket as the Doge's Palace, which is the most efficient way to see the square's interiors in one visit.

Getting there and timing. Vaporetto lines 1 and 2 stop at San Marco Vallaresso and San Zaccaria, both a two-minute walk away; on foot the square is roughly 35 minutes from Santa Lucia station through the Mercerie. Go at dawn. Between about seven and nine in the morning the square is close to empty, the light comes low across the lagoon and hits the basilica facade directly, and the whole space reads as architecture rather than as a crowd. From November to January acqua alta can put water across the paving, and duckboards are laid on the standard routes; the MOSE barriers, operational since late 2020, now hold back most serious events. April to June and late September to October are the comfortable months; the square in August is hot, shadeless and thick with tour groups.