Padua Cathedral and Baptistery Site Features

The baptistery is a squat brick octagon with a low dome, architecturally unremarkable from outside and deliberately so -- it was built as a functional adjunct to the cathedral. Everything is on the inside.

Giusto de' Menabuoi covered every surface: an enormous Paradise filling the dome with concentric rings of saints around Christ, and cycles of Genesis, the life of Christ and the life of the Baptist below. Because the space is small and the painting continuous, the effect is closer to standing inside a decorated vessel than looking at pictures on walls.

The cathedral is a large, sober, three-aisled classical interior in pale stone, its scale impressive and its detail restrained. The unfinished facade is the building's defining external feature by default.

The dome of the baptistery

Giusto de' Menabuoi's Paradise, hundreds of figures in concentric circles. Look up first; everything else in the room is secondary to it.

A complete cycle

Unusually for 14th-century fresco, almost nothing here has been lost. What you see is close to what was finished in 1378.

Fina Buzzaccarini's tomb

The patron is buried in the room she commissioned, which is rarer than it sounds.

The unfinished facade

Bare brick where the stone front was to go, and a good illustration of how many Italian churches actually ended up.

The cathedral and baptistery stand on Piazza del Duomo, two minutes west of Piazza dei Signori and slightly off the main pedestrian flow through the centre.

The square is quieter than Padua's market and civic squares, which is part of why the baptistery is still a comparatively calm visit despite its UNESCO status.