St Mark's Museum and Cathedral from above (Skip The Line Guided Tour)

Before booking, please note:

• the skip-the-line access to St. Mark's Basilica is included in the tour;
• max 25 participants per group;
• to access to St. Mark's Museum you have to climb a steep staircase therefore the tour is not recommended to people with limited mobility and wheelchair users. We apologize for the inconvenience!
• the tour is monolingual (English, Italian or French).

A new and exclusive guided tour that will lead you to the discovery of the precious mosaics of St Mark’s Cathedral and its famous bronze horses and enthral you with the emotions of a unique panoramic view of St Mark’s Square in Venice.

Everyone knows of the famous Venice St Mark’s Cathedral in St Mark’s Square, but the tour that we offer will lead you to the discovery of the history and the art techniques of the wonderful San Marco Church from a different perspective - from above.

Our visit will start by visiting St Mark's Church Museum in Venice. The guided tour of St Marks Museum will let you admire some small scale models that show how the St Mark’s Basilica was built and how this huge basilica appeared to the eyes of people visiting it in the past.

You can then admire the famous mosaics of St Mark’s Basilica from an advantaged place that will let you observe them from a close-up and appreciate the different construction stages of St. Mark’s mosaics. But how were the mosaics of the domes of St Mark’s Basilica made? In the adjacent room there are several panels that illustrate the time-honoured techniques and we will show you some original portions of the fourteenth century mosaics of St Mark’s in Venice, that were removed during the 19th century restoration work.

Continuing our tour after visiting St Mark's Museum in Venice, you will learn more about the mosaics of St Mark's Cathedral domes by listening to the explanation of the elaborated representations, away from the crowds that gather in front of the altar of the church, which has been enshrining the mortal remains of San Marco for more than 1000 years.

Afterwards, trough a narrow passage way, we will leave St Mark’s Basilica to enter an ancient hall of the Venice Doge’s palace, today a part of the Patriarchal Palace, where a few tapestries, which were used in the past in St Mark’s Cathedral during the most important liturgical celebrations, are housed.

A fundamental point during our guided tour of San Marco Museum in Venice will be the visit to the gilded bronze horses - masterpieces of the Greek Hellenistic sculptures once used to adorn the hippodrome of Constantinople and today a symbol of the Venice Cathedral. Next to St. Mark’s horses some architecture fragments are housed, dating back to the oldest construction phases of St Mark’s Basilica in the IX century A.D.

The guided tour will then continue to the lodge of St Mark’s Cathedral, where, in the shade of the paired horses and the wonderful gothic frame that crowns the facade of the Cathedral, you will admire from above one of the icons of Venice: St Mark’s Square. From this unusual panoramic view of St Mark’s Square the tour will be wrapped up with an overview of the main buildings that make St Mark’s Square one of the most fascinating and suggestive places in the world.

Important info

Departure point map