Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore Site Features

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.

The bronze doors

Forty-eight panels of scriptural scenes and the life of San Zeno, cast in two campaigns across the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The earlier panels are stiff and strange; the later ones markedly more assured. Few things in Italy show medieval sculpture changing so plainly in one place.

Mantegna's San Zeno Altarpiece

Painted 1457-60 for this altar, and one of the works that established the Renaissance in northern Italy. The predella panels below are copies; Napoleon took the originals, and two remain in Tours with one in the Louvre.

The Wheel of Fortune

Brioloto's rose window, with figures rising and falling on the rim.

The crypt

A forest of columns with San Zeno's body below the presbytery -- and the setting Shakespeare gives Romeo and Juliet's wedding.

San Zen che ride

A polychrome statue of the saint, smiling. Verona is fond of it.