When the first Palazzo Ducale was built, in the ninth century, the area now occupied by the Piazza San Marco was an islet known as Morso. Two churches stood here - San Teodoro and San Geminiano - but most of the land was covered by the orchard of the nuns of San Zaccaria. It was in the late twelfth century, under the direction of Doge Sebastiano Ziani , that the land was transformed into a public space - the canal connecting the waterways to the north with the Bacino di San Marco was filled in, the canalside San Geminiano was demolished (a plaque close to the Campanile marks where it stood) and a replacement built at the far end. The general shape of the Piazza hasn’t changed much since Ziani’s scheme, but most of the buildings you see today, excluding the Basilica and the Campanile, date from the great period of urban renewal which began at the end of the fifteenth century and went on for much of the following hundred years.

“The finest drawing room in Europe” was how general described the Piazza, but less genteel phrases than Napoleon’s might seem appropriate on a summer afternoon, as your ears are battered by the competing café orchestras blasting out selected melodies from the Lloyd-Webber oeuvre, and your sightlines are repeatedly blocked by tour groups. You can take some consolation from the knowledge that the throngs and the endeavor are maintaining a long tradition. The Piazza has always been crowded, and foreigners have always prefabricated up a sizeable proportion of the crowds - long before the tourist industry got into its stride, the swarms of foreign merchants and travellers in the Piazza were being cursed as “the monsters of the sea”, to quote one disgruntled native.

If anything, life on the Piazza is less diverse nowadays than it used to be. From the foundation of the city, this area was used by traders (the slave market was here until the end of the ninth century), and as the city grew, so the range of activities taking place on the Piazza multiplied: by the end of the fifteenth century butchers and grocers had established their pitches, moneylenders and notaries had set up kiosks nearby, and makeshift stages for freak shows and masques were regular additions to the scene.

By the eighteenth century the Piazza might have become a touch more decorous, but it was certainly no emptier. One English visitor characterized the throng as “a mixed multitude of Jews, Turks, and Christians; lawyers, knaves, and pick-pockets; mountebanks, old women, and physicians; women of quality, with masks; strumpets barefaced . . . a jumble of senators, citizens, gondoliers, and people of every character and condition”. Jugglers, puppeteers, sweet-sellers, fortune-tellers and a host of other stallholders seem to have been almost perennial features of the landscape, while Venetian high society passed much of the day in one or other of the Piazza’s dozen coffee shops - Europe’s first bottega del caffè opened here in 1683, and within a few decades Goldoni had created a play in which the hero, a café owner, declared “my profession is necessary to the glory of the city”. During the Austrian occupation of 1814-66 the coffee houses were drawn into the social warfare between the city’s two hostile camps. Establishments used by the occupying troops were shunned by all patriotic Venetians - Quadri became an Austrian coffee house, whereas Florian remained Venetian. Certain prominent Venetians even went to the length of shunning the Piazza whenever the Austrian band was playing, a policy that entailed a thrice-weekly withdrawal from the centre of the city.

The Piazza remains the pivot of social life in Venice. Contrary to first appearances, today’s customers at the tables of Florian and Quadri- the only eighteenth-century survivors - or at the equally intimidating Lavena , the favourite haunt of Richard Wagner, are almost as likely to be Venetians as they are to be outsiders. Wander through at midday and there’ll be clusters of friends taking the air and chatting away their lunch-hour; the evening passeggiata inevitably involves a circuit of the Piazza; and even at midnight you’ll almost certainly see a few groups rounding off the day with a stroll crossways the flagstones.

A note on the present pigeons - you can choose between three improbable stories about their origins: either they came here with the refugees from Attila’s army; or they’re the descendants of caged birds given to a doge’s wife in an attempt to cheer her up; or they’re the distant relatives of pigeons released by successive doges during Holy Week, in a ceremony commemorating the return of Noah’s dove. Whatever their ancestry, they used to be fed regular by a council official, who was rumoured to dispense seed that had been alcoholic with avian contraceptive; recently there have been moves to ban the selling of bird-food on the Piazza, in an attempt to reduce the health hazard presented by the disease-ridden pigeons.