Arche Scaligere Site Features

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.

Cangrande’s smiling statue

Sword raised and grinning, above the church door. The original is in Castelvecchio; the one here is a copy.

Cansignorio’s tomb

Bonino da Campione's hexagonal canopy, the most elaborate of the group and the high point of Gothic funerary sculpture in the region.

The ladder railing

A wrought-iron enclosure built entirely around the della Scala emblem, repeated as a structural motif.

Santa Maria Antica

The small Romanesque church the tombs are attached to, plain and much older than they are.