Discover Basilica of Saint Anthony

A brick basilica carrying eight domes and two slender brick minaret-like bell towers, so the roofline reads as Byzantine rather than Italian Gothic. Inside, the plan is a long nave with an ambulatory running right round behind the high altar, and the pilgrim route moves continuously round that ring rather than stopping in the nave.

The building is an outlier in Italian architecture. Eight domes rise over a Latin-cross plan, flanked by two slender bell towers that read as minarets, and the whole composition owes more to Byzantine and Islamic models -- almost certainly transmitted through Venice's own eastward-looking building -- than to anything in the Veneto.

Underneath that silhouette the fabric is Romanesque at the west end and Gothic further east, a consequence of eighty years of construction. The brick exterior is deliberately plain; the richness is all inside.

The Cappella dell'Arca, which holds the tomb, was rebuilt in the 16th century as a marble chamber lined with nine large relief panels by Tullio Lombardo, Jacopo Sansovino and others -- a Renaissance interior inserted into a medieval church, and one of the finest sculptural cycles of its period.