Ascoli Piceno Cathedral

Most altarpieces by Carlo Crivelli, the Venetian painter who spent most of his career in the Marche, were taken apart long ago, and their panels now hang separately in museums from London to Milan. The one in Ascoli Piceno Cathedral is the exception. Signed and dated 1473, it still stands complete in its gilded Gothic frame, in the building it was made for, in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

The Virgin and Child sit at the centre, with Crivelli's signature on the step of her throne. Beside them stand Saints Peter, John the Baptist and Paul, and Emidius, the city's patron bishop, to whom the cathedral is dedicated. Above them is a Pietà, the dead Christ mourned, flanked by more saints, and along the base runs a row of apostles.

The cathedral around it is built in layers. Its crypt, finished by the 1050s, holds the tomb of Saint Emidius among 64 travertine columns, some of them reused from Roman buildings. The travertine facade on Piazza Arringo, the city's oldest square, went up between 1529 and 1539 to a design by Cola dell'Amatrice, a painter and architect from the nearby mountain town of Amatrice.