Discover Padua Cathedral and Baptistery

A cathedral with a blank unfinished front of bare brick and stone blocking, standing on a square beside a small square-plan brick baptistery with a low dome. The cathedral interior is wide, pale and plainly lit; the baptistery next to it is the opposite — a single dim room whose every surface, dome included, is covered in a fourteenth-century fresco cycle.

The baptistery is a squat brick octagon with a low dome, architecturally unremarkable from outside and deliberately so -- it was built as a functional adjunct to the cathedral. Everything is on the inside.

Giusto de' Menabuoi covered every surface: an enormous Paradise filling the dome with concentric rings of saints around Christ, and cycles of Genesis, the life of Christ and the life of the Baptist below. Because the space is small and the painting continuous, the effect is closer to standing inside a decorated vessel than looking at pictures on walls.

The cathedral is a large, sober, three-aisled classical interior in pale stone, its scale impressive and its detail restrained. The unfinished facade is the building's defining external feature by default.