Built in the eighth century and seriously damaged during the earthquake that devastated Verona in 1117, the church of Santa Maria Antica was rebuilt with Romanesque forms and rededicated in 1185 by the patriarch of Aquileia.
Over the centuries it was the subject of numerous interventions that profoundly changed its original appearance: in the thirteenth century the Scaligeri, the powerful lords of Verona who had placed their palaces of power nearby, chose it as their private chapel and in the seventeenth century their interiors were adapted to the baroque taste of the time.
A new restoration, carried out in the last years of the nineteenth century, has returned to the church the original style and that scent of antiquity that still seduces Veronese and tourists today. Externally the church, built with alternating bands of brick and stone, is adorned with small splayed windows and suffocated by the surrounding buildings that almost completely hide its delicate forms.
The small square bell tower, which finds its base above the main apse, is valuable; it is totally in tuff and in pure Romanesque style, with mullioned windows in the belfry and conical conical brick roof. The temple is accessed through a side entrance, dominated by the magnificent ark of cangrande della Scala, one of the major monuments of the fourteenth-century Veronese sculpture that insinuates itself into the wall of the church forming an ensemble of extraordinary and delicate beauty.
The sarcophagus is located within a trefoil arch and surmounted by an equestrian statue of the prince, a faithful reproduction of the original which is kept in the Castelvecchio museum.
Church of Santa Maria Antica
Address: Via Arche Scaligere
Phone: +39 045.595508
Site:
https://www.santamarianticaverona.it/Location inserted by
CHO.earth