St Mark's Campanile

St Mark’s Campanile tickets: the lift to the top and an audio guide

You go up St Mark’s Campanile by lift, about 30 seconds from the foot of the tower to the bell chamber. Our entry ticket costs €25 and comes with a digital audio guide, an app that talks you through the tower and has more than 100 stops around the rest of Venice as well.

Our ticket has one price for everyone aged 6 and over, and it can’t be refunded or moved to another day. The basilica isn’t part of it, and you don’t need to visit the church to go up the tower.

Two other tickets put the tower together with more. The St Mark’s Basilica and Bell Tower tour starts at €52 and is the one with the basilica: skip-the-line entry to both, and its dearer option adds a fast-track guided tour of the church. The other, at €61.50, leaves the basilica out and adds a two-hour walking tour of Venice and the Gondola History Museum to a skip-the-line entry to the tower. It’s the only one of the three you can cancel, up to 24 hours ahead.

No Venice city pass covers the campanile. The Venezia Unica City Pass leaves it out, along with the basilica, and the Museum Pass is for the museums the city runs. The one package that has it is the St Mark’s Square Pass, at €70.50, where you pick the campanile or the basilica and get the Doge’s Palace and Ca’ Rezzonico with it.

St Mark’s Campanile hours, the security check and the way in

The tower opens every day from 9:30, and what changes with the season is how late it stays open. Hours can also change around events and in bad weather.

The lift is small, so in high season a queue builds at the foot of the tower while people wait their turn. A visitor who went up first thing in the morning found it quiet, which makes the start of the day the time to aim for.

Before the lift there’s a security check with a metal detector, and staff can look inside your bag. The rules also advise against heels, because some passages are narrow and steep. Our ticket isn’t listed as wheelchair accessible, and the tower publishes nothing official on step-free access.

The campanile stands in Piazza San Marco, next to the basilica, and vaporetto line 1 stops at San Marco. When the high tide floods the square, raised walkways and alternative routes take you to the entrance, and a panel at the base of the tower shows the tide level live, with the forecast for the hours ahead.

The view from the top of St Mark’s Campanile

The lift opens straight into the bell chamber, so you stand among the bells, with the basilica and the square straight below and the lagoon beyond the roofs. The basilica’s own site doesn’t say when the bells ring these days, though Lonely Planet has the Marangona ringing at noon and midnight.

From watchtower to collapse: St Mark’s Campanile and its five bells

The first tower here was a watchtower, built in 888 for Pietro Tribuno, doge of Venice, the Republic’s elected ruler. In 910 a tower that was both lighthouse and bell tower took its place.

Lightning struck it again and again from 1388 on. After the earthquake of 1511 a restoration gave it a gilded spire and, in 1513, a wooden angel that turned with the wind. In August 1609 Galileo Galilei carried his telescope to the top to show it to the doge, and in 1776 Abbot Toaldo fitted a lightning rod, after which the strikes stopped doing damage.

On 14 July 1902 the campanile collapsed on itself. The square had been emptied and guarded, and no one was killed. Venetians call the tower “el paron de casa”, the master of the house, and the city decided to rebuild it “com’era e dov’era”, as it was and where it was, words it used again after Teatro La Fenice burned in 1996.

The new tower opened on 25 April 1912, St Mark’s Day, and its lift followed in 1932. Of the old bells, only the Marangona survived the collapse; the other four were recast by the Barozzi brothers’ foundry, paid for by Pope Pius X, who had been Patriarch of Venice, and inaugurated with the new tower. Each of the five carries a name from the days of the Republic, and each had a job to do for the city.