Beyond the golden mosaics, the basilica hides two more surprises: the Treasury's glittering Byzantine loot and the original bronze horses of the facade. The Museum Pass covers both - and much of Venice besides.
Last updated August 6, 2026
In a nutshell: two compact museums hide the treasures - the Treasury's Byzantine loot and the original bronze horses upstairs - and the Museum Pass covers them all. Start from the San Marco overview or the Basilica.
The Treasury (Tesoro, €5; a compact two-room affair in the south transept - possibly closed for restoration) shelters chalices, reliquaries and jewelry, the bulk of it seized from Constantinople in 1204: since Venice fancied itself Rome's granddaughter and Byzantium's daughter, locals regard these objects as inherited rather than plundered. Some pieces approach 2,000 years in age and fuse civilizations - an antique Roman rock-crystal chalice embellished with Byzantine enamels and finished in gold filigree by Venetian goldsmiths. The relics room keeps glass cases holding the bones of Doge Orseolo (r. 976-978), who raised the church that preceded this one, and of St. George, the dragon-slayer; directly ahead, gold-and-glass caskets protect relics of Christ's Passion, the centerpiece (1125) depicting Christ bound to a pillar and scourged while clutching a stone from that very pillar - treasures paraded through the streets every Good Friday for 800 years. In the principal hall, circle the central vitrine of Byzantine loot: a fourth-century Roman rock-crystal lamp set in 11th-century Byzantine metalwork, a black bucket carved with satyrs pursuing nymphs, rectangular gold icons bearing lapis-lazuli Crucifixions, chalices in sardonyx, agate and rock crystal, the 'Grotto of the Virgin,' a censer modeled as a domed church and a jewel-studded icon of the Archangel Michael. Along the walls: delicate Venetian filigree, an outsized topaz and a turquoise bowl from Persia, the Urn of Artaxerxes I (Egyptian diorite, 2,500 years old, fashioned for the Persian king the Bible credits as a friend to the Israelites), a 600-year-old ceremonial crosier still employed on feast days, the Ciborio di Anastasia (a marble canopy that once spanned the communion wafer, named for a lady-in-waiting of Justinian obliged to dress as a monk to escape the emperor's attentions), two golden altar panels showing 14 episodes from the life of St. Mark, and a granite column that descends below the present floor - visible proof of how far the basilica has settled over the past millennium. The backstory: Venice's fortune, and this churchful of treasures, flowed from Byzantium, the eastern Roman Empire that survived the fall of Rome in AD 476 and flourished in Constantinople for another thousand years. After the Byzantines ejected 60,000 Roman Catholics in the Massacre of the Latins (1171-1182), ambitious Venice spotted its opening when the pope summoned the Fourth Crusade: the doge's fleet carried more than 30,000 crusaders - not to Jerusalem, but to Constantinople, which was sacked and held from 1204 to 1261 while every ship bound home for Venice was obliged to bring the Republic a souvenir. The Venetians were plainly thieves, though thieves of impeccable taste: much of the treasure that adorns this church was already seven centuries old when it arrived eight centuries ago, and any Venetian will argue that had they not 'rescued' it, little would have survived. Just behind the high altar stands the Pala d'Oro, the Golden Altarpiece (€5): a staggering golden screen of 250 blue-backed enamels set in a gold frame and pricked with 15 chunky rubies, 300 emeralds, 1,500 pearls and sundry sapphires, amethysts and topaz - roughly 30 pounds of gold in total. The Byzantine enamels formed part of the 1204 plunder, later assembled by Byzantine craftsmen expressly for St. Mark's altar. At the center, Jesus as Ruler of the Cosmos occupies a golden throne, a halo of jewels and pearls behind him, facing forward in blessing while darting a sidelong glance at Mark and the other saints; along the bottom row, Old Testament prophets display the books they authored; at the sides, Mark's saga runs from his encounter with Peter at the gates of Rome (where Peter supplied him the eyewitness material for his Gospel) to the two merchants sailing home with his coffin in 829. The cloisonné method - gold leaf stamped with a design, the hollows flooded with enamel paste and fired, each hue baked in its own firing, certain saints even sporting pinned-on pearl crowns - was a Byzantine hallmark. The altarpiece revolves on a pivot and is rotated on festival Sundays so the entire congregation may savor it, as Venetians have done for generations. Within the altar itself, legible through the grille, sits an urn inscribed Corpus Divi Marci Evangelistae - 'Body of the Evangelist Mark' - where the saint lies at peace, just as the angel promised. Shh. Napoleon's marauding troops mistook the gold for mere gilding and never melted it, and during World War II it was concealed in an Umbrian villa - which is why it survives today.
The San Marco Museum (Museo di San Marco, €7) begins with a steep staircase near the main entrance and winds one-way past mosaic fragments - from the church's oldest, most purely 'Byzantine' efforts (c. 1070) to the more naturalistic work of the 1700s, each piece captioned with small photographs showing where it once slotted into a grander design - with peeks into the interior from the north transept, including a close view of the Tree of Jesse mosaic of 1540, far more contemporary in feel than the 1200s domes. The Sala dei Banchetti, formerly the doge's dining hall, brims with devotional objects, tapestries and rugs, lace vestments from Burano, illuminated 16th-century musical manuscripts (before the treble and bass clefs existed, chant was notated on a sliding C clef), a doge's throne, and the museum's most distinguished piece: the Pala Feriale by Paolo Veneziano (1345), 14 painted panels that once shielded the Golden Altarpiece - seven saints across the top, seven scenes from Mark's life below, rendered with notable naturalism, among them the stirring sailboat panel of the merchants' tempest-tossed homecoming, calmed when Mark himself materializes at the stern (the artist proudly signed this panel), and the discovery of Mark's long-concealed body hidden within a column. Then comes the collection's centerpiece: the original bronze horses (La Quadriga), the only quadriga to survive from antiquity, striding forward in pairs with smiles on their muzzles. They were produced by the lost-wax technique - molten bronze poured into clay molds rather than hammered - and each weighs close to a ton; they were originally gilded (traces of gold leaf persist, though the ruby pupils that once made their eyes sparkle are long gone), and the naturalism is stunning: halters, distended veins, flared nostrils, pricked ears. Legend traces them to Greece in the age of Alexander the Great (fourth century BC), whence Nero carried them to Rome, Constantine shipped them to Constantinople to decorate the chariot racetrack, the Venetians pilfered them in 1204 and mounted them on the basilica balcony where the doge addressed his subjects. Napoleon, having conquered Venice, carted them off to Paris, where they topped a triumphal arch until his downfall; back in Venice, they made their briefest and final trip in the 1970s, supplanted by modern replicas (check the 1978 date stamped on the hoof of the right-hand horse) and moved indoors to escape air pollution. From the stone balustrade you gaze down over the gilded interior - in medieval times this was the women's gallery, men in the nave and clergy at the altar, while the doge harangued his public from the pulpit - and the mosaic pavement unfurls beneath like a Persian rug. The circuit concludes on the exterior loggia, where you can play doge for a moment, standing beside the bronze horses above St. Mark's Square, wandering among the statues of water-carrying slaves that double as drain spouts - the spellbinding, lordly prospect over the heart of a city that once reigned as Europe's great power.
If you plan several sights, the Museum Pass is the cumulative ticket for the permanent collections of the Musei Civici di Venezia: valid for 6 months, it allows one admission to each museum with no reservation required, and it covers the Doge's Palace, the Correr, Ca' Rezzonico, the Glass Museum, the Lace Museum and the rest of the civic network (the Clock Tower is not included). Buy it online at visitmuve.it or at any participating museum.