The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

san marco
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The Basilica di San Marco
to overcome the discrepancy between the first Venetians’ notion of their spiritual
pedigree – as successors of the shattered Roman Empire and as the first state to be
founded as a Christian community – and the inglorious fact that the settlement
of the lagoon islands had begun as a scramble to get out of the way of Attila the
Hun. Having thus assured themselves of the sacred ordination of their city, the
proto-Venetians duly went about fulfilling the angelic prophecy. In 828 a pair of
merchants called Buono Tribuno da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello stole
the body of Saint Mark from its tomb in Alexandria and, having smuggled the
corpse past the Muslim guards by hiding it in a consignment of pork (or so the
story goes), brought it back to Venice and presented it to the doge.
Work began immediately on a shrine to house the relic; modelled on Constantinople’s
Church of the Twelve Apostles, it was consecrated in 832. In 976
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