Basilica of Santa Anastasia

About this place

Seven centuries on, Verona's largest church still has no face. Bare brick rises above a marble base whose cladding stops halfway up and was never carried any further. The Dominicans began building in 1290 and were still at it nearly two centuries later, when the church was finally consecrated in 1471; smaller works dragged on for generations after that, and nobody ever got to the facade. Oddly, the deficiency now works in its favour: a blank slab of brickwork that opens without warning onto a carved Gothic doorway, and behind that an interior that bears no resemblance to the outside at all. Step in and you find a forest of enormous columns cut from red Verona marble, pink where the low light catches it, holding up a vaulted ceiling covered in fine painted foliage that runs overhead like a hanging carpet, while underfoot the floor is worked in interlocking geometry of white, red and black marble. The space is far larger than the exterior suggests, the light is low and calm, and seating in the nave is sparse — this is a church you walk through rather than sit in. Its most famous feature, though, is neither an altar nor a painting. At the foot of the first two columns crouch two small hunchbacked men, bearing the holy water stoups on bent backs with tired, patient faces. Verona calls them i gobbi, the hunchbacks; the left one (1491) is traditionally credited to Gabriele Caliari, father of the painter Veronese, and the right one (1591) to Paolo Orefice, though scholars argue about both attributions. They are the most photographed thing in the building: the first thing you see and the last you forget. As for Pisanello's fresco of Saint George and the Princess, brace for mild disappointment. It sits high on the wall above the arch of the Pellegrini chapel, painted in the 1430s, stripped off the wall at the end of the nineteenth century to save it from damp, and worn to the point that the left half is all but gone; it is smaller than the reproductions imply, and without a phone zoom or a small pair of binoculars you will barely read it. The chapel is worth standing in front of regardless, lined as it is with Michele da Firenze's sculpted terracotta panels of 1435. The church stands two minutes from the Scaliger Tombs and about five from Ponte Pietra, so it folds into one walk without effort. If you only have time for a single Verona church, make it San Zeno for its bronze doors; but if you buy the combined ticket, Anastasia is the one closest to the centre and the easiest to slot into a day.