The Clock Tower on Piazza San Marco (Torre dell'Orologio) can be entered only on a guided tour booked in advance. The tour lasts about an hour and costs 15,00 euro full price or 11,00 euro reduced, with departures in Italian, English and French on a fixed weekly timetable. Children under 6 are not admitted (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). There is no walk-in door.
The visit does not start at the tower. The meeting point is the ticket office of the Museo Correr, at the far end of the square in the Ala Napoleonica, five minutes before the departure time on the booking (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). From there a guide takes the group through the tower on narrow metal spiral staircases, past the gear trains that drive the astronomical clock face, the rotating barrels that show the hours and minutes on the facade, and the housing where the wooden figures of the Three Kings and the Angel wait for their twice-yearly procession. The tour finishes on the open terrace beside the bronze bell and the two hinged figures that strike it.
The same 15,00 euro ticket also gives free admission to the Museo Correr, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale and the Monumental Rooms of the Biblioteca Marciana, so one booking covers three further sites at no extra cost (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
Can you go inside the Clock Tower in Venice?
Yes, and only one way. Visits are available solely on prior booking, with a specialised guide, and the tour lasts about an hour (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Nobody can buy a ticket at the foot of the tower and walk up, because the tower has no public entrance of its own on the Piazza. Every visit is a timed departure with a named language, and the booking is what gets you in.
There are three ways to book. The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia sells the ticket through its own online shop, linked from the tower's ticket page. The call centre takes bookings on 848082000 from inside Italy and on +39 041 42730892 from abroad, every day from 9am to 1pm, and the same office answers by email at [email protected] (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Tickets can also be bought at the Museo Correr ticket office, which is where the tour meets.
Only some reduced tickets can be booked online: those for children aged 6 to 14, students aged 15 to 25 and visitors over 65. Every other reduction and every free entitlement is issued at the ticket office on presentation of the documents (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
- Book a departureOnline, by phone on 848082000, or at the Correr ticket office
- Pick the languageItalian, English or French, on the day's published timetable
- Go to the Museo CorrerAla Napoleonica, at the far end of Piazza San Marco
- Arrive early5 minutesAt the ticket office before the departure time
- Do not be late15 minutesMore than this after departure means exclusion from the tour
How much is the Clock Tower tour in 2026?
The single ticket is 15,00 euro full price and 11,00 euro reduced (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The guide is included in that price, because there is no unguided option.
The reduced rate covers a long list: children aged 6 to 14, students aged 15 to 25, visitors over 65, Venetian residents, holders of the Rolling Venice card, holders of the St Mark's Square Museums ticket or the Museum Pass, anyone buying a ticket for the Secret Itineraries tour at the Doge's Palace, ICOM members, MUVE Friend Card holders and holders of an ISIC card (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Children under 6 are not admitted at any price.
What makes the 15,00 euro go further is what comes with it. Holders of a Clock Tower ticket get free admission to the Museo Correr, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale and the Monumental Rooms of the Biblioteca Marciana (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Those three sites form the integrated route that the 35,00 euro St Mark's Square Museums ticket covers alongside the Doge's Palace. If the palace is not on your list, the Clock Tower tour is the cheaper way into the rest of the square's civic museums. The Correr opens 10:00 to 17:00 from 1 November to 31 March and 10:00 to 18:00 from 1 April to 31 October, with last admission an hour before closing, so an afternoon tour can run past the point where that free entry is still usable.
Does the Museum Pass or the St Mark's Square ticket include it?
No. The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia states the exclusion in plain words on its ticket page: the Museum Pass grants entrance to a list of twelve civic museums, Clock Tower not included (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The 50,00 euro pass, valid six months, covers the Doge's Palace, the Correr route, Ca' Rezzonico, Palazzo Mocenigo, Carlo Goldoni's House, Ca' Pesaro, MUVEC, the Glass Museum, the Lace Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Fortuny Museum and the Torcello Museum. The tower is absent from all of them.
The 35,00 euro St Mark's Square Museums ticket does not include it either. That ticket is valid for the Doge's Palace and for the integrated route through the Correr, the Archaeological Museum and the Marciana monumental rooms (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
What both passes do is lower the price. Holders of either one qualify for the 11,00 euro reduced Clock Tower ticket, which has to be booked and paid for separately. In practice a visitor with a Museum Pass pays 50,00 euro plus 11,00 euro to add the tower, and a visitor who only wants the tower and the three sites its ticket includes pays 15,00 euro.
Clock Tower tour times in English, Italian and French
The timetable is fixed by language, and it is the single most useful thing to check before booking, because an English departure does not run at the same hours as an Italian one (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
Tours in English run on Mondays at 11.00 and 14.00, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 12.00 and 14.00, Thursdays at 12.00, Fridays at 11.00, 14.00 and 16.00, Saturdays at 14.00 and 16.00, and Sundays at 11.00. English has the widest coverage of the three, with departures every day of the week and three on a Friday.
Tours in Italian run on Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 12.00, and from Thursdays to Sundays at 15.00. Tours in French run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 15.00, Thursdays at 14.00, Saturdays at 11.00 and Sundays at 14.00, which leaves Mondays and Fridays without a French departure.
Further visits on demand are available, and the booking office takes those requests on 848082000 from Italy or +39 041 42730892 from abroad, Monday to Friday between 9:00 and 13:00, or by email (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The tower publishes no separate seasonal timetable, so these are the hours to work from in both winter and summer. Check the tower's announcements page before travelling, because that is where the Fondazione posts changes.
What you see inside: the machinery, the barrels and the terrace
The tour climbs through the working parts of a clock that has run since 1499. At the centre of the tower is a system of gear wheels in a large cruciform metal frame, divided into four clock trains, each with a barrel wound with a chain carrying a 100 kg motor weight, an intermediate wheel and a rotating fan that acts as an aerodynamic brake on the weight's descent (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The mechanism you see dates from 1753 to 1757, when Bartolomeo Ferracina reworked the original machinery built at the end of the 15th century by Zuan Carlo Rainieri.
Alongside the trains sit the barrels that turn the numerals on the facade. The clock train activates the barrel machinery every five minutes, which rotates the minute barrel through 30 degrees, a twelfth of a turn, and does the same to the hour barrel every 60 minutes.
On the way up, the tour passes the housing of the Three Kings and the Angel with the Trumpet. Their procession past the Madonna and Child was designed to run hourly in 1499, but wear forced it back, and since Ferracina's rebuild of 1758 to 1759 it runs twice a year, at Epiphany and at the Ascension. The wooden statues themselves were remade by Giovanni Battista Alviero in 1755.
The tour ends on the terrace beside the bell and the two bronze statues that strike it, both cast in 1497.
- 1493Clock commissionedThe Senate commissions Zuan Carlo Rainieri
- 1497Bell and figures castThe bell and the two bronze statues on the terrace
- 1499Clock unveiledRecorded by Marin Sanudo on 1 February
- 1755Wooden figures remadeThe Three Kings and the Angel, by Giovanni Battista Alviero
- 1753-57Mechanism rebuiltBartolomeo Ferracina's machinery, still running
Where the tour meets, and who should not climb
The meeting point is the ticket office of the Museo Correr, five minutes before the departure time on the booking (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The Correr is at San Marco 52, and its public entrance is the monumental staircase in the Ala Napoleonica, the wing that closes the western end of Piazza San Marco, opposite the basilica. The tower itself stands at the other corner of the square, over the archway into the Merceria, so visitors who wait at its foot are in the wrong place.
Lateness is enforced. Arriving more than 15 minutes after the departure time means exclusion from the guided tour (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
The Fondazione is direct about who should not go up. The interior is a series of small spaces linked by narrow and steep stairs, the building is inaccessible to anyone with walking difficulties, and the visit is not recommended for pregnant women or for anyone affected by claustrophobia, vertigo, heart conditions or respiratory disease. The tower is not accessible to disabled visitors, and children under 6 are not allowed (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). The stairs are the metal spiral staircases installed in the 19th century, when the original wooden flights were torn out.
Getting there by water: vaporetto line 1 to Vallaresso or San Zaccaria, line 2 to Giardinetti, or lines 4.1 and 5.1 to San Zaccaria (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).
