Palloni's frescoes
A Florentine painter in a Baltic monastery.
Augustas Didžgalvis — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Vilensija — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Radosław Botev — CC BY 3.0 pl · Radosław Botev — CC BY 3.0 pl
A bus from central Kaunas takes about half an hour, or a pleasure boat across the reservoir in summer — the water approach is lovelier and shows the monastery's peninsula setting.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
The finest Baroque complex in north-eastern Europe: Pažaislis was built between 1667 and 1712 for Camaldolese monks on a peninsula in the Kaunas reservoir, funded by Lithuania's Grand Chancellor — with architects, sculptors and painters brought from Florence and Venice, so it came out purely Italian on Baltic ground. Its church is hexagonal — rare in European architecture — with a dome, a concave facade and an interior sheathed in pink marble and frescoes, the best known by the Florentine painter Michelangelo Palloni. The monastery was ruined repeatedly: Napoleon's troops looted it, the tsars turned it Orthodox, then it served as a Soviet hospital and store — and was returned to nuns in 1992. Restoration has run for thirty years and visits are by guided tour into the church and cloisters. In summer the Pažaislis Music Festival is held here: classical concerts in the courtyard and the church with its acoustics — Kaunas's most famous summer festival.
A Florentine painter in a Baltic monastery.
Sheathing the whole hexagonal interior.
T. Masiulio g. 31, Kaunas