The Treasury of St Mark’s

Where it is

The Treasury is kept in old rooms between the church and the Doge’s Palace, reached through a door in the south transept. Over that door is a thirteenth-century mosaic of two angels holding the reliquary of the Cross, which survived the fire of 1231 unharmed. A small vestibule leads left to the Sanctuary and right to the Treasury itself.

Can you visit it today?

We could not confirm it. None of the Basilica’s current documents — its 2026 tariff, its ticket shop and its access rules — mentions a Treasury ticket, opening hours or closure. Visitors disagree: one, on a travel forum in 2026, mentions paying a few euros extra on top of the entry; another was told in 2022 that it was closed because of the small space. Some resale sites quote a price, but not from any document of the Basilica, so we do not repeat it. If the Treasury matters to you, ask at the Basilica on the day.

Nine centuries of gifts and spoils

The pieces came as gifts from emperors and kings, popes, cardinals and patriarchs, Doges and Procurators — and as the fruit of looting, and of pledges that were never redeemed. Their history can be traced, in part, from 13 January 1231, when fire destroyed the room that held them. Only four reliquaries survived, all sent from Constantinople by Doge Enrico Dandolo in 1204: the Precious Blood, the Cross of Christ, the head of Saint John the Baptist and the arm of Saint George.

The Procurators of St Mark kept and enlarged the Treasury, and from 1283 began the series of inventories that record its acquisitions. It was locked behind three heavy doors whose keys were held by three different Procurators, and opened only for important political visitors, on the Senate’s order and with strict ceremony.

It held not only sacred objects. The Basilica lists the Doge’s solid-gold corno set with precious stones, the ducal sword, the long silver trumpets carried before the Doge in processions, the twelve crowns and twelve breastplates of the “Marie”, the crowns of Cyprus and Crete, and gems of the Palaeologi, the Medici, the Sforza, Henry III and Cardinal Domenico Grimani.

1797, and after

When the Republic fell in 1797 the provisional Municipality ordered the Treasury plundered, like every church in the city, to pay the war contributions owed to the French. The Basilica calls the damage inestimable: 537 kilos of gold and silver were taken from the Treasury and the Scuola dei Mascoli, and the precious stones stripped from vestments and furnishings were valued at 300,000 ducats. What remained was further reduced between 1815 and 1819, when stones and pearls were sold to pay for restoring the Basilica.

The four collections today

• Antiquity and the early Middle Ages — two rock-crystal lamps carved as fish, and two amphorae with animal handles, each cut from a single block of oriental agate.
• Byzantine goldwork of around the year 1000 — chalices and patens of hardstone mounted in gold and silver with cloisonné enamel, and two portable icons of Saint Michael the Archangel.
• Islamic art of the ninth and tenth centuries — a turquoise glass cup with animals in relief, the ewer of the Caliph al-ʿAzīz bi-llāh, and the rams’ flask, in rock crystal and gilded silver.
• Western work — including a famous incense burner shaped as a small domed building with five cupolas, and much filigree.

On the south wall hang two altar frontals still used when the Patriarch celebrates: the frontal of Saint Mark, of the late thirteenth century, and that of Pope Gregory XII, of the fifteenth, from the old cathedral of San Pietro di Castello. And there is the reliquary-throne of Saint Mark, in alabaster worked in Alexandria, perhaps in the sixth century, which the Emperor Heraclius gave to Patriarch Primigenius of Grado in 630.