The story
In a side chapel on the left of Verona's cathedral, Titian's Assumption of the Virgin stands over the altar. Painted around 1535, it shows the apostles gathered at Mary's empty tomb as she rises above them, and it sits in a chapel designed by Jacopo Sansovino, the Florentine sculptor and architect then working in Venice. It is the one picture art lovers come looking for, yet the building around it is a working cathedral, Santa Maria Matricolare, and the Titian is one stop in a whole group of churches.
At the main door, a porch signed by the sculptor Nicholaus in 1139 rests on carved griffins, and beside it stand stone figures of Roland and Oliver, knights of Charlemagne from the medieval epics. The Romanesque church was consecrated in 1187, and its interior was later painted with 16th-century frescoes of angels and illusionistic architecture.
From the cathedral a passage leads to the baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, with a large octagonal font carved with scenes of Christ's early life, and to the small church of Sant'Elena, where excavations show mosaic floors of the early Christian churches that stood here first.
