Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore

A masterpiece of Romanesque architecture, the striped brick and tuffo stone Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore was built in honour of the city’s patron saint from the 12th to 14th centuries. Enter through the graceful flower-filled cloister into the vast nave, lined with 12th- to 15th-century frescoes depicting Jesus, Mary Magdelene modestly covered in her curtain of golden hair and St George casually slaying a dragon atop a startled horse. Under the rose window depicting the Wheel of Fortune are meticulously detailed 12th-century bronze doors, including a scene of an exorcism with a demon yanked from a woman’s mouth. Painstaking restoration is reviving Mantegna’s 1457–59 Majesty of the Virgin polyptych altarpiece, painted with such astonishing perspective and convincing textures that you might believe there are garlands of fresh fruit hanging behind the Madonna’s throne. Downstairs is a creepy crypt, with faces carved into medieval capitals and St Zeno’s eerily lit corpse in a transparent sarcophagus.