Discover Arche Scaligere

In a small enclosure beside the church of Santa Maria Antica, a minute from Piazza dei Signori, stand the tombs of the della Scala family, who ruled Verona through the fourteenth century.

They are among the finest Gothic funerary monuments in Italy: stone canopies on columns, each holding a sarcophagus, each topped by the dead lord on horseback in full armour.

The whole group is fenced by a wrought-iron railing carrying the family's emblem, a ladder -- scala -- repeated over and over. It is a coat of arms used as architecture, and it works.

Each tomb follows the same idea: a sarcophagus raised on columns, sheltered by a carved stone canopy or tabernacolo, and crowned by an equestrian figure of the man inside.

The style is developed Italian Gothic -- pinnacles, crockets, tabernacle niches with saints, and delicate open stonework in white marble.

Cangrande's tomb, the earliest and simplest, sits over the church door; his statue shows him smiling, sword raised, which is unusual in funerary sculpture and much remarked on.

Cansignorio's, by Bonino da Campione, is the most ornate: a tall hexagonal canopy with statues of saints in niches around it, and the most sculpture of any of the three.

The iron railing enclosing the group is fourteenth-century, and its repeated ladder motif is the family's arms turned into a fence.

One idea, repeated and escalated. Every tomb is the same arrangement: sarcophagus raised on columns, sheltered by a carved stone tabernacolo, topped by an equestrian figure. What changes between them is scale and elaboration — the sequence reads as a family competing with its own predecessors.

Built to be seen from below and from outside. Raising the sarcophagus on columns puts the effigy above head height and against the sky, and setting the group in the open rather than in a chapel means the audience is the street. The wrought-iron enclosure with the ladder emblem of the family encloses without hiding.

Local stone, carved thin. The canopies are cut in Verona stone with pinnacles, crockets and tabernacle niches worked almost to lace at the top — detail that survives because it is high, sheltered by its own canopy, and never quarried.

What is up there is a copy. Cangrande I’s original equestrian figure was moved indoors to Castelvecchio for conservation, and the one on the tomb is a replica — the same decision most Italian cities have made about outdoor sculpture.

Can I go inside the enclosure? The tombs are normally seen through the ironwork from the street, which is how they were meant to be seen. Closer access is limited and seasonal.

Where is the original Cangrande statue? In Castelvecchio, mounted on Carlo Scarpa’s cantilever. The one outdoors is a copy.

What is the ladder motif? The della Scala arms — scala means ladder. It repeats through the ironwork and the carving, and it is the family signing its own monuments.