The city’s patron saint was (and is) Saint Mark the Evangelist, to whom the famous basilica on the Rialto is dedicated, but even he was, in a sense, stolen goods. In 828 a pair of Venetian merchants thieved Mark’s relics from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, smuggling the saint’s bones through customs inside a barrel of pork, which they trusted—rightly—the Muslim inspectors would not investigate too closely.
