St Mark's Campanile tickets: prices, opening hours and the lift to the top

A ticket for St Mark's Campanile (Campanile di San Marco) costs €15 at the official rate and buys exactly one thing: thirty seconds in a lift and permission to stand on top of the tallest tower in Venice for as long as you like. There are no rooms, no museum, no route to follow. It is a viewpoint, and you choose it by the hour rather than by the day.

What it costs and what you get

The Procuratoria di San Marco, the body that runs the basilica and its tower, charges as follows:

The 50% concession on the individual rate applies to 10- to 18-year-olds, students up to 26 and over-65s, alongside discounts for groups of four or five adults. Concessions cannot be combined, and you will be asked for ID at the barrier.

One point that clears up a lot of confusion: the free entry granted to residents of the diocese does not apply to the campanile. Anyone who walks into the basilica free because they live in Venice, Jesolo or Mira still pays to go up the tower.

The campanile ticket is entirely separate from the basilica ticket. Neither one includes the other.

St Mark's Campanile tickets compared

Official ticket at €15. The lowest price available. You book a day and an hour on the Procuratoria's site. If your date is fixed and it is not peak season, you need nothing else.

St. Mark's Campanile: Entry Ticket on Tiqets, from €25. This comes with a digital audio guide in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, and it is among the best-selling products for Venice: 3.9 out of 5 from more than 570 reviews, with a stated duration of 40 minutes. The nine-euro difference pays for the audio guide and for availability when the official slots have closed. It does not include the basilica.

St. Mark's Basilica & Bell Tower Tour, from €52. That matches €10 + €15 at official rates, but it folds two separate booking systems into one confirmation. Sensible only if you have a single morning.

St. Mark's Basilica, Bell Tower & Doge's Palace: Guided Tour, from €133. Two hours of guided visit with skip-the-line entry to the three main monuments, plus the Historic Gondola Gallery. This is the package for one day in Venice and no appetite for juggling three bookings.

Campanile plus a walking tour, from €61.50. Three hours in all: a skip-the-line ticket and a two-hour guided walk through the sestiere, the city district. It suits anyone who arrives without knowing where to look.

Opening hours and when to go up

Opening: 9:30 all year round. Summer: last entry between 20:00 and 20:30, closing at 21:15. Winter: last entry between 18:00 and 18:45, closing at 19:15.

Hours shift with events, with the month and with the weather. In strong wind, a thunderstorm or thick fog the lift stops running, so if the sky looks uncertain, check before you buy a non-refundable ticket.

The right hour. There are two, and they do different jobs:

• 9:30 on the dot, for the shortest queue of the day. Until about 10:30 the line at the door is a few minutes long.
• The last hour before closing, for the light. In summer that means around 20:00, with the sun low over the lagoon and the Giudecca backlit. This is when the photographs that justify the ticket happen.

Avoid the 11:00–15:00 stretch, when the overhead sun drains the colour and the queue peaks.

Season. From November to February you often walk straight in, but the tower closes early: at 19:15 in winter it is already dark, and that changes the view completely.

What you can see from the top, and what you cannot

From the belfry, just under 60 metres up, you look down on the lead domes of St Mark's Basilica, the chequerboard of the square, the basin with San Giorgio Maggiore and the Giudecca opposite, the lagoon towards Murano and the Lido, and on clear winter days the line of the Alps to the north.

What you do not see are the canals. From that height the roofs close over one another and the pattern of water disappears; anyone who goes up expecting the Venice of aerial postcards comes down disappointed. For canals you need a lower terrace, such as the one at Palazzo Pisani or the Scala Contarini del Bovolo.

A practical detail: the belfry is open on all four sides behind wide-mesh grilles, so you photograph without glass in the way. The bells are right there, a few metres off, and if they ring while you are up the noise is considerable.

The smart way in

The entrance is at the foot of the tower on the square side, next to the Loggetta del Sansovino. There is one queue and it moves at the speed of the lift, which takes only a few people per trip. That is why a thirty-metre line can take forty minutes even when the square looks quiet.

Three things worth doing:

1. Go up before the basilica, not after. At 9:30 the campanile queue is shorter than the basilica's; by midday it is the other way round.
2. Watch the sky, not the calendar. In August haze the view shrinks to two kilometres and the ticket is worth half what you paid.
3. If the queue is over twenty minutes, change target. The bell tower at San Giorgio Maggiore, five minutes away by vaporetto, the public water bus, almost never has a queue at all.

The alternatives with a view

If you only have one view in the budget and you want the classic photograph of Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore beats St Mark's Campanile for one simple reason: from St Mark's you cannot photograph St Mark's.

Why the campanile dates from 1912

The tower you see is a little over a century old, but its shape is a thousand years old. Building started in 888 under Doge Pietro Tribuno as a watchtower; after the rebuilding of 910 it served as a lighthouse for the lagoon as well as a bell tower. The belfry went up between 1156 and 1172, with a wooden spire clad in copper. In 1776 Giuseppe Toaldo fitted the lightning conductor, after centuries of absorbing strikes.

On 14 July 1902 the tower collapsed in on itself, without killing anyone. The decision was to rebuild it exactly as it had been, on the same spot: it reopened on 25 April 1912, St Mark's day. The lift arrived in 1932.

At the base, the Loggetta designed by Jacopo Sansovino in the sixteenth century was crushed by the collapse and reassembled from the recovered fragments. Look at it before you go up: it is the finest piece of architecture anywhere on the campanile.

How to save money

• Book on the Procuratoria's own site: €15 against €25 from the resellers. For a family of four that is a forty-euro difference.
• Ask for the 50% concession for under-18s, students up to 26 and over-65s: the campanile drops to €7.50 a head.
• Skip the combo if you have two days. Bought separately, the basilica and campanile cost €25 in total.
• Consider San Giorgio Maggiore if all you want is the panorama: it costs less than the campanile and gives you a view the campanile cannot.
• The access fee is a different matter. On the days set by the council, day visitors not staying overnight pay €5 if they book ahead or €10 at the last minute, only at cda.ve.it, and it is included in no ticket of any kind: see the page on the Venice access fee.

Getting there

Address: Piazza San Marco, 30124 Venice, on the corner between the square and the piazzetta.

• Vaporetto: San Marco-Vallaresso (lines 1, 2 and night line N), three minutes on foot; San Zaccaria (lines 1, 2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2 and N), six minutes. ACTV is the city's public transport operator.
• On foot: 10 minutes from Rialto, 12 from the Accademia, about 35 from Santa Lucia station.
• Access: the entrance at the base and the lift make the trip up workable for anyone who cannot manage stairs, though the space at the top is small and very tight at busy times.

What's nearby

• St Mark's Basilica — thirty metres away, but a separate booking.
• Doge's Palace — two minutes, on the other side of the piazzetta.
• The Bridge of Sighs — five minutes, free to look at from the Ponte della Paglia.
• Torre dell'Orologio — on the north side of the square, guided visits by booking only.
• San Giorgio Maggiore — five minutes by vaporetto from the San Zaccaria stop.

In short: St Mark's Campanile is worth the €15 official ticket if you go up at opening or in the last hour, with a clean sky. At midday in August, with forty minutes of queue and haze over the lagoon, the same money buys far more elsewhere.