Discover Basilica of Saint Anthony

The building is an outlier in Italian architecture. Eight domes rise over a Latin-cross plan, flanked by two slender bell towers that read as minarets, and the whole composition owes more to Byzantine and Islamic models -- almost certainly transmitted through Venice's own eastward-looking building -- than to anything in the Veneto.

Underneath that silhouette the fabric is Romanesque at the west end and Gothic further east, a consequence of eighty years of construction. The brick exterior is deliberately plain; the richness is all inside.

The Cappella dell'Arca, which holds the tomb, was rebuilt in the 16th century as a marble chamber lined with nine large relief panels by Tullio Lombardo, Jacopo Sansovino and others -- a Renaissance interior inserted into a medieval church, and one of the finest sculptural cycles of its period.