St. Mark's Basilica

This church exists because of one of history's greatest heists. In 828 AD, two Venetian merchants smuggled the body of St. Mark the Evangelist out of Alexandria, Egypt, hiding the relics under layers of pork meat to disgust Muslim customs officials into not searching the cargo. Venice got a patron saint, and Alexandria got a really good story about the time they were robbed.

The basilica you see today is mostly the result of an 11th-century rebuild under Doge Domenico Contarini, but the looting didn't stop with St. Mark's bones. After the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, Venetians hauled back everything that wasn't nailed down — and some things that were. The four bronze horses on the facade came from Constantinople's hippodrome, where they'd stood since antiquity. Napoleon stole them in turn in 1797 and sent them to Paris, but they came back after Waterloo. The originals are now inside the museum; the ones outside are replicas.

More than 85,000 square feet of golden mosaics cover the interior — enough to cover about one and a half football fields. The oldest date to the 11th century and tell biblical stories in glittering tesserae that catch the candlelight in ways that feel deliberately designed to make atheists reconsider. The Pala d'Oro, the golden altarpiece behind the main altar, is studded with 1,300 pearls, 300 emeralds, 300 sapphires, and 400 garnets.

Until 1807, this wasn't even the city's cathedral — it was the Doge's private chapel, a flex that tells you everything about how Venice confused church and state.