St Mark's Basilica

St Mark’s Basilica tickets: a set time, with a host or a guide

Each of our St Mark’s Basilica tickets comes with a person: a host who meets you and takes you in, or a guide who tells you what you’re looking at. That’s the basilica’s own rule, which only allows its entry to be sold on with a service on top. The time slot comes from the basilica too: since 1 July 2025 every visit has a ticket with your name and a half-hour slot, and you go in at that time.

The hosted entry, for the basilica’s ground floor with someone to take you in, suits you if you want the church and its mosaics at your own pace: its basilica-only option costs €17, and options at checkout add the terrace, or the terrace and the Pala d’Oro. It’s the only one of the three with a Pala d’Oro option, and it can’t be cancelled or moved. Tiqets, the company that issues our tickets, allows 30 minutes to an hour for it in all.

The 30-minute guided tour, at €28.80 with a live guide, is for ages 11 and up. It’s the one you can still cancel, up to 48 hours before, but it leaves out the Pala d’Oro, the terrace and earphones.

The 45-minute tour with the terrace, at €44, adds the museum and the original horses, with a guide in English, German, French, Italian or Spanish, and its first dates are from 1 March 2027. It meets in the square, just past Caffè Florian, with the Crown Tours team in purple t-shirts.

Both guided tours also include the sacristy of the Salute, the church at the mouth of the Grand Canal, and Santa Maria Assunta, the cathedral on the island of Torcello, with its Last Judgement in mosaic. If you’re heading out to Murano and Burano, Torcello is a short hop on from Burano.

Some of these tickets say “skip the line” in their name, but there’s no separate line: everyone goes in at their booked time and through a metal detector.

Which Venice passes include St Mark’s Basilica

The two bundles from Tiqets include the basilica in a block of their own, next to the Doge’s Palace and a boat trip or a gondola. Venice’s City Pass and the Museum Pass don’t cover it: they stop at the Doge’s Palace and Venice’s civic museums.

Inside each bundle you choose a date for every ticket, and once bought they can’t be refunded. Venice Pass and Venice’s museum passes adds up both bundles against the basilica and the palace bought separately.

Inside St Mark’s Basilica: the 20-minute route and the dress code

The visit is a route between ropes on the ground floor of the basilica, and the rules give you up to 20 minutes on it, plus up to 10 at the Pala d’Oro. You can stop to look, as long as you don’t hold up the people behind you. The staff are strict at the door, and visitors get turned away for bare shoulders and big bags.

Leave the high heels behind too, because some passages are narrow and steep. For visitors with a disability, a lift and a platform go up to the museum floor.

St Mark’s Basilica opening hours, and Sundays from 14:00

The basilica opens to visitors every day, but on Sundays and holidays only in the afternoon, because the morning is for Mass. On a Sunday morning the museum and the terrace are the parts you can visit.

The times can change on religious feasts and for the ceremonies of the Patriarch, Venice’s archbishop, and visitors aren’t let in during services. If high water floods the narthex, the entrance hall, the staff set up a different route. On Sundays the 10:00 Mass is sung by the Cappella Marciana, the basilica’s own choir, and anyone can go in for it through the Porta dei Fiori.

The mosaics and the Pala d’Oro inside St Mark’s

The mosaics were begun in the 1070s and spread over the domes, the arches and the walls, on a ground of gold. From the nave you look up at saints and Bible scenes, with Christ Pantocrator in the apse at the far end.

Behind the high altar stands the Pala d’Oro, 3.34 metres wide, with about 250 enamels on gilded silver and 1,927 gems. The basilica calls it the only large piece of Gothic goldsmith’s work in the world to have survived intact. It was first made under the doge Ordelaffo Falier, at the start of the 12th century, and renewed in 1209 with enamels probably brought from Constantinople after the city was sacked in 1204.

What you see today is the version remade in 1343–45 under the doge Andrea Dandolo. Since 1958 it has stood on a turning mechanism that keeps it facing backwards, so visitors can see it up close, and it only turns round to the nave for the Patriarch’s ceremonies.

St Mark’s Museum: the original bronze horses and the terrace

The museum fills the rooms above the entrance hall and the doge’s old banqueting hall. Its prize is the four original bronze horses, the only team of four horses to survive from antiquity, probably taken from the Hippodrome of Constantinople and brought to Venice in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade.

The horses stood out on the façade until 1977 and moved indoors for good in 1982, after their restoration. The ones you see from the square are bronze copies. They stand on the terrace, which you reach through the museum and which looks straight down over Piazza San Marco; up there, children up to 12 have to be held by the hand.

St Mark’s Basilica, built for the body of St Mark

In 829 the remains of St Mark the Evangelist arrived from Alexandria, and Venice took him as its patron saint. The first church burned in a revolt in 976, and the one you visit today was begun in 1063 and consecrated in 1094.

The Fourth Crusade that brought the horses also carried off the Nicopeia, an icon of the Virgin; the weekday Masses are still said at the Nicopeia altar. For centuries this was the doges’ chapel, next to their palace, and it only became Venice’s cathedral in 1807, ten years after the fall of the Republic.

Getting to St Mark’s Basilica

The basilica faces Piazza San Marco. You can walk there through the lanes from Rialto or the station, or take the waterbus down the Grand Canal to San Zaccaria.

Waterbus tickets and multi-day passes are on the Venice vaporetto page, and getting from the airport covers the boats and buses into the city. The bell tower in front of the basilica has its own ticket and its own page, St Mark’s Campanile.