St Mark's - details

On my last day in Venice, as you may recall, I got the chance to go back for a closer look at the treasures of St Mark's, including the Pala d'Oro altar screen, the treasury, and the 'museum' up in the rafters, where you can get a closer look at some of the mosaics and go outside. Voilà les photos

The interior of St Mark's from the upper balcony - obviously the lights being on/off makes a huge difference

Jesus mosaic

Close-ups of mosaics in the museum

The original horses from the outside of St Mark's are now housed inside the church, in the upper-level museum

Pretty bad photo of the Pala d'Oro altar screen

I thought at first this was a detail of the Pala d'Oro, but on further inspection I think it's a detail of a different golden thingy in the treasury. Photos of all these things were verboten, so a lot of them didn't come out too well

Golden mini Church in the treasury

Lion of St Mark in the museum

Detail of the floor

Mosaic on the roof outside

View from the roof

Outside roof mosaic

Not a great photo, but proof I wuz there

Horsey and the campanile, from up on the roof

View of the sea from the roof

View of St Mark's Square from the roof. I might have said this already, but criminals were executed between the two columns, and supposedly superstitious Venetians don't walk between them. The one that's not a lion is the old patron saint of Venice, Theodore I think

St Mark's interior

Off sick today - that cold caught up with me with a vengeance - so catching up on a few (zillion) photos of Venice. I will come back and add the close-ups of the mosaics and 'treasures' of St Mark's, plus exteriors later. In the meantime, apologies for my less-than-stellar photographs & the fact that I probably took doubles of a lot of mosaics, but just can't help yourself, it's so gorgeous. I wanted a sort of mosaic effect, but it took ages fiddling around to get them to go left-right-left, at which time the preview assured me that they would be side by side, which they were patently NOT for the most part. So I tried to fiddle around with the widths of the sidebar and, as you can see, wound up changing the whole template & couldn't find my old one again :( Well, we'll give this a whirl for a while at least.