Basilica of Saint Anthony Site Features

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.

The tomb

In the north transept, surrounded at almost all hours by people with a hand on the stone. The marble reliefs behind it are Renaissance sculpture of the first rank, but they are not what the queue is for.

Donatello's high altar

Bronze figures of the Madonna and six saints, plus reliefs of Anthony's miracles, made in the 1440s. Rearranged more than once since, so the present arrangement is not Donatello's own.

Gattamelata

Donatello's equestrian bronze of 1453 stands in the square outside -- the first monumental bronze horse and rider cast in Europe for a thousand years, and the model for every one that followed.

The Treasury Chapel

Reliquaries displaying, among other things, the saint's tongue and vocal cords, preserved and shown deliberately: he was famed as a preacher, and the relics chosen make that argument.

The basilica sits at the southern end of Padua's historic centre, on the large open Piazza del Santo, a few minutes' walk from both Prato della Valle and the botanical garden.

The square in front is unusually generous for an Italian church, which is a practical necessity rather than a design flourish -- it has to hold the crowds that gather on feast days. Gattamelata stands in the middle of it.

The surrounding streets support an economy of religious goods, guesthouses and pilgrim services that has existed in some form for seven centuries. It is a distinctly different quarter from the student-dominated centre fifteen minutes north.