Verona Cathedral Historical Timeline

This is not one church but a walled precinct, and there have been Christian buildings on the ground since the fourth century — several of them stacked, and visible under the cloister today. The cathedral above them is Romanesque below and Gothic above, with the join left plainly visible on the facade.

Chronology

1. early 4th century The first church here, a three-nave basilica about 17 by 37 metres. Later in the same century it is given hypocaust heating and mosaic floors during the episcopate of San Zeno — parts of which are what you walk over on raised walkways now.
2. 2nd half of the 5th century A far larger second basilica replaces it, roughly 29 by 73 metres with a narthex. The site’s importance is established long before anything currently standing.
3. late 8th–early 9th century A new cathedral dedicated to Santa Maria Matricolare is built under Bishop Annone and finished by his successor Ratoldo — the same Ratold who oversaw the translation of San Zeno’s relics.
4. 842–847 The church of Sant’Elena, inside the same precinct, is consecrated by Andrea, Patriarch of Aquileia. It is still part of the single ticket today.
5. 1117 The catastrophic earthquake — the same one that levels San Zeno and takes the Arena’s outer ring.
6. 1120 Romanesque reconstruction begins. The craftsman Niccolò makes the double protiro: the two-storey porch on columns resting on griffins, whose jambs carry Roland and Oliver, Charlemagne’s paladins, named in inscriptions on a cathedral door.
7. 1123 The baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte is rebuilt, and the canons’ cloister is documented. The precinct takes the shape a visitor walks through now.
8. 1187 The new cathedral is consecrated by Pope Urban III on 13 September.
9. 1532 The Nichesola family commission Jacopo Sansovino to redesign their chapel and its altar — the chapel that holds Titian’s Assumption.
10. 1534 Francesco Torbido frescoes the apse and triumphal arch, working from cartoons by Giulio Romano.
11. 1550 Michele Sanmicheli completes the tornacoro, the curved screen around the choir — the most conspicuous Renaissance object inside a Romanesque building.
12. 1587 The facade elevation is completed, with Cardinal Agostino Valier’s arms placed at the summit.
13. 1913–1931 Ettore Fagiuoli works on raising the campanile further and never finishes it. The bell chamber was completed to his design in 1925, and the tower is visibly incomplete to this day.

A precinct, not a building

Cathedral, baptistery, Sant’Elena, the canons’ cloister and the bishop’s palace grew together as a walled episcopal compound, which is why one ticket covers several buildings and why an hour is the honest allowance rather than twenty minutes.

Under the cloister the floors of the earlier churches remain in place rather than being lifted and displayed elsewhere. That decision is why parts of the walking surface are glass and raised walkway, and why the fourth century is underfoot rather than in a case.