Basilica di Sant’Anastasia Site Features

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.

Pisanello’s St George and the Princess

In the Pellegrini Chapel, high and awkwardly placed, and worth the neck-ache. A knight, a princess, a distant city and a pair of hanged men in the background -- International Gothic at its most refined and least sentimental. Coin-operated lighting helps.

The gobbi

Two crouching figures carrying holy-water stoups just inside the door. Verona is fond of them and they are much touched.

The marble floor

Fifteenth-century geometric paving in red, white and grey.

The Pellegrini Chapel terracottas

Twenty-four terracotta reliefs of the life of Christ by Michele da Firenze, of the 1430s, below the Pisanello.

The unfinished facade

Bare brick where marble was intended -- an honest record of a project that outlived its money.