Discover Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore

San Zeno stands a little outside the centre of Verona, which is part of why it is quieter than it deserves to be. It is one of the finest Romanesque churches in Italy.

Three things in particular are worth the walk: the bronze doors, forty-eight panels cast across the eleventh and twelfth centuries and among the great works of medieval metalwork; the carved facade reliefs by the sculptor Nicolò; and Mantegna's altarpiece of 1457-60, painted for this high altar and still on it.

The crypt below is where Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are married, which the church is content to let visitors enjoy.

The facade is pale tufa and marble, tall and narrow, with a projecting porch carried on two columns that stand on the backs of crouching lions -- the standard Lombard-Romanesque protiro, here done at its best.

Above it is the rose window, carved by Brioloto and known as the Wheel of Fortune: six figures ride the rim, rising and falling as it turns. It is a sermon rather than a decoration.

Either side of the doors are the relief panels -- Genesis on one side, scenes from the life of Christ and the legend of Theodoric on the other -- carved by Nicolò and Guglielmo around 1138.

Inside, the church is divided into three levels: a nave, a raised presbytery over the crypt, and the crypt itself. The nave has a fourteenth-century ship's-keel ceiling in painted timber.

The campanile alongside was built between 1045 and 1178; the taller square tower beyond it is what remains of the abbey.

Tufa and marble, banded. The facade is built in alternating courses of pale tufa and marble — cheap local stone and expensive imported stone used together as a deliberate pattern rather than a compromise. It is tall, narrow and almost flat, with the gable left plain so the rose window and the porch do the work.

The protiro. The projecting porch rests on two columns standing on the backs of crouching lions — the standard Lombard Romanesque solution, here at its best. It is a structurally independent canopy: it carries nothing but itself, and exists to frame the door and shelter the reliefs.

The doors are cast, not carved. The forty-eight bronze panels were made over roughly a century by different hands, which is why the style shifts between them — some are flat and schematic, others modelled almost in the round. They are fixed to a wooden core, and the casting technique is the reason they have survived nine hundred years of weather that has taken most of the stone detail around them.

The interior is a roof, not a vault. The nave is covered by an open timber truss shaped like a ship’s keel, not by masonry vaulting. That is why the walls can be thin and the building feels wide: there is no outward thrust to contain.

Is it far from the centre? About twenty minutes on foot west of Piazza Bra, or a short bus ride. That distance is the main reason it stays quiet.

Is the Mantegna in its original place? Yes, above the high altar. It was taken to Paris under Napoleon and returned, though some predella panels stayed in France. It was painted for this spot, which is why the painted architecture lines up with the real building.

Can I see the crypt? Yes — it runs under the raised choir and holds the tomb of Zeno. It is part of the normal visit, not a separate ticket.