Discover Basilica di Sant’Anastasia

Sant'Anastasia is the largest church in Verona, a Dominican basilica begun in 1290 and worked on for two centuries. Its facade was never finished, which is the first thing you notice and the least important.

Inside, the scale is the point: tall Gothic naves on huge columns of Verona marble, and a floor of red, white and grey stone laid in patterns.

The reason art historians come is a small fresco high in a chapel by the choir: Pisanello's St George and the Princess, painted around 1436-38 and one of the finest surviving works of International Gothic anywhere.

The church is a Gothic basilica on the Italian rather than the northern model: wide, tall and calm, with broad bays and no flying buttresses or vertical strain.

Twelve massive columns of Verona marble divide the naves -- pink, red and white, polished, and doing most of the visual work.

The floor is a geometric pavement of red, white and grey marble, laid in the fifteenth century and one of the best of its kind in the region.

The facade is unfinished brick above a fourteenth-century carved portal with a marble surround; the intended marble cladding was never applied.

Inside the door, two holy-water stoups rest on carved crouching figures known as the gobbi -- the hunchbacks -- one of them attributed to the young Paolo Veronese's father.

The campanile is fourteenth-century, and the small church of San Giorgetto stands attached at the side.

An Italian Gothic basilica, which means no buttresses. The church is wide and tall with broad bays, and it carries its vaults without the flying buttresses and vertical strain of the northern tradition. Italian builders solved the same problem with thicker walls, wider spacing and tie-rods across the arches — the iron bars visible overhead are structural, not later additions.

Twelve columns of local marble. The nave piers are monoliths of Verona marble, pink, red and white, polished rather than carved. Verona had this stone in quantity and used it where other cities would have used painted plaster; the colour is the decoration.

The floor is part of the design. The pavement is laid in geometric compartments of red, white and grey stone running the length of the building, and it is original work rather than a later refit.

The unfinished facade is informative. Because the marble facing was never applied, you can see the brick structure it was meant to hide, and the beginnings of the cladding at the base. It is a section drawing of how an Italian Gothic front was actually assembled.

Where is the Pisanello? High on the wall of the Pellegrini chapel, to the left of the choir. It is small and set awkwardly high — it was painted for a position above an arch, not for comfortable viewing.

What are the hunchbacks at the door? The two crouching figures carrying holy water stoups at the entrance, known as i gobbi. They are sixteenth-century and are the most photographed thing in the building.

Why is the front unfinished? Money and time. Construction ran for two centuries and the marble facing was never applied; the church was simply put into use as it stood.