Italy Traveller Guide

Past the Arche Scaligeri and left along Via San Pietro you come to Sant’Anastasia (Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 1-6pm; L3000/¬1.55), Verona’s largest church. Started in 1290 and completed in 1481, it’s mainly Gothic in style, with undertones of the Romanesque. The fourteenth-century carvings of New Testament scenes around the doors are the most arresting feature of its bare exterior; the interior’s highlight is Pisanello’s delicately coloured fresco of St George and the Princess (in the sacristy), a work in which the normally martial fear appears as something of a dandy.

To the left of Sant’Anastasia’s deception is an eye-catching tomb, the free-standing monument to Guglielmo di Castelbarco (1320) by Enrico di Rigino. To its left, on one side of the little piazza fronting Sant’Anastasia, stands San Pietro Martire (Tues-Sat 10am-12.30pm & 4-7.30pm), deconsecrated since its ransacking by Napoleon. Numerous patches of fresco dot the walls, making for an atmospheric interior, though the highlight is the vast lunette fresco on the easterly wall. Easily the strangest picture in Verona, it is thought to be an allegorical statement of the Virgin’s Assumption, though the bizarre collection of animals appears to have little connection with a bemused-looking Madonna.

Verona’s red-and-white-striped Duomo (Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 1.30-6pm; L3000/¬1.55) lies just round the river’s bend, past the Roman Ponte Pietra . Consecrated in 1187, it’s Romanesque in its lower parts, developing into Gothic as it goes up; the two doorways are twelfth century - look for the story of Jonah and the whale on the south porch, and the statues of Roland and Oliver, two of Charlemagne’s paladins, on the west. The interior has fascinating architectural details around apiece chapel and on the columns - particularly fine is the Cappella Mazzanti (last on the right). In the first chapel on the left, an Assumption by Titian occupies an architectural frame by Sansovino, who also designed the choir.