Discover Piazza San Marco

The square's paved floor follows a geometric pattern of radiating trapezoidal bands, designed in the early 18th century by Andrea Tirali to visually correct the piazza's irregular, slightly trapezoidal shape and make it read as more regular than it actually is -- the same optical logic behind the square's tapering sides.

The two arcaded buildings framing the square were built more than a century apart and in different styles: the Procuratie Vecchie, on the north side, is early 16th-century and still shows late Gothic proportions in its arcade, while the Procuratie Nuove opposite it, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi and finished under Baldassare Longhena, is a fully classical composition modeled partly on Sansovino's nearby library -- a rare case of two directly facing facades built a century apart in deliberately different architectural languages.