Piazza San Marco, Venezia

Speranza



Familiarity can NEVER dull the magical effect of the great piazza San Marco and the startling novelty of its images: the broad level space, where there are no vehicles of any kind, the immense campanile, and the long, long, fairy-tale shape of St. Mark's closing the vista.

This facciata, with its unparalleled wealth of shafts below, encrusted with the richest marbles, mosaics, statuary and gilding, surmounted by ogee gables extravagantly crocketed and by a cluster of oriental domes, is so full of incongruities and improbable juxtapositions that it bursts upon the eye like a fantastic dream miraculously translated into stone.

It is an intende expression of the harmonious reconciliation of contrasts, of the love of display, and the fundamental horizontality which chracterise Italian art everywhere.

St. Mark's stands on the site of the original basilican church founded in AD 864 to receive the body of the saint.

The plan was entirely altered between 1042 and 1085 and assumed the Byzantine form of a Greek cross with domes.

The facciata dates mostly from the 12th century.

The paved Piazza, the centre of city life, assumed its definitive form in the 15th century.

It was originally the site of a convent garden but ceased to be used as such when the space became necessary for the gathering of the people for the "arengo", the method by which the Venetians elected the Doge.

The campanile was begun by Doge Giovanni Partecipazio towards the end of the 10th century, but it was not actually erected until the 12th.

Repeated damage by lightning weakened the structure and eventually caused the whole building to collapse in 1902.

It was repuilt in 1912 exaxtly as it had been before the disaster.