Some people, called Veneti, were troubled by a wild tribe from the north. So they moved to these islands to get away from these annoying tribes. The Veneti cut posts made of cedar wood, which does not easily rot, and drove them down into the water, and on top of these posts they built their houses. The Veneti lived chiefly on fish, which they caught in large numbers, because all they had to do was to drop a line or net out of the front door. In fact, they caught so many fish they could not eat them all. So they gathered salt by drying seawater and salted the fish so that they would keep.

As the Veneti lived on the water they had to be good sailors, and they were. So they sailed to all corners of the Mediterranean Sea, selling their salt fish and selling salt too, and bringing back in payment silk gowns and rugs and jewels. Then people from all over Europe came to Venice to buy these things which the Veneti had brought back in exchange for this fish and salt, and Venice became the greatest shopping-place, the greatest market, in Europe. So the Venetians, as the Veneti came to be called, kept on getting richer and richer. They built beautiful palaces along the canals, and as they believed a certain saint had brought good luck to them and their city, they built a beautiful church to him. This saint was St. Mark. They found his bones and buried them in this church underneath the altar. St. Mark’s Church is different-looking from any of the churches I have told you about so far. It has five domes, one on each side and one big dome in the center, but these domes are not like those of St.Paul’s or the Capitol—they are shaped like an onion.

Pictures are usually painted with paint, and you have probably never seen colored pictures made without paint. But the inside of St. Mark’s, and the outside too, is covered with hundreds of pictures, not made with paint but out of bits of colored stone and gold and colored glass. Such pictures are called mosaics. They will not fade nor peel off, nor wash off, as painted pictures might do.

As you might have a dog for a pet, St. Mark was supposed to have had a lion for a companion, so on top of a column, out in front of his church, the Venetians put a bronze statue of a lion with wings. Over the door of the church there are four horses.