Basilica of St Anthony in Padua

1. What the Basilica of St Anthony Is

The Basilica of St Anthony is a large Franciscan church in the south of Padua, in the Veneto, begun in 1232 over the grave of the friar Anthony and finished in its main lines by the early fourteenth century. Its purpose has never changed. The building exists to let crowds of people reach a tomb, pray at it, and leave without crushing each other, and every unusual thing about the architecture follows from that job. Paduans do not usually call it by its full name. They call it il Santo, the Saint, and they use the same word for the church and for the man in it.

Three objects account for most of why people come. The first is the ark, the stone chest in the north transept that holds the remains, surrounded by a chapel of white marble carved with the saint's miracles. The second is the Chapel of the Relics behind the high altar, a tall baroque room of black and coloured marble where the relics are shown in gold reliquaries, including the tongue taken from the grave at the translation of 1263. The third is the high altar itself, which carries bronze figures made by Donatello during ten years he spent working in Padua from 1443.

Everything else in the building is layered around those three points: two frescoed chapels of the fourteenth century in the transepts, a chapel holding a wooden statue of the Madonna older than the basilica, an ambulatory of radiating chapels around the sanctuary, the tomb of a famous mercenary captain, four cloisters, a library and a museum. A visitor who plans a short stop will find there is a great deal more to look at than the tomb.

The basilica sits inside a much wider pattern of Italian shrines that a pilgrim will often see in the same fortnight, from Assisi in Umbria to the north Italian relic churches. Our guide to pilgrimage sites in Italy puts Padua in that map, and our guide to what a pilgrimage is explains what the Church means by travelling to a place at all.

2. Why the Church Stands on This Spot

The basilica stands here because Anthony asked to be carried here to die and because a small friary church was already on the ground. Anthony died on 13 June 1231 at Arcella, on the northern edge of Padua, while being brought back into the city from the countryside at Camposampiero. He had asked to be taken to Padua, to the friars at Santa Maria Mater Domini, and he did not make it inside the walls.

The Church That Was Already There

Santa Maria Mater Domini was a modest church with a small Franciscan convent beside it, the community Anthony had joined in the city. His body was brought there after a dispute between the friars at Arcella, the nuns, and the civic authorities over where he should be buried, and the burial at Mater Domini settled it. Within months the grave was drawing crowds large enough that a small church could not hold them. That older church was never demolished. It was absorbed into the fabric of the basilica as it grew around it, and it survives as the chapel now known by the statue it contains, the Madonna Mora, described in section 13.

Canonised in Under a Year

Anthony was canonised by Pope Gregory IX on 30 May 1232, under a year after his death. The interval is commonly cited as one of the shortest between a death and a canonisation in the Church's history, and the point that matters for reading the building is the speed itself. Building on the new basilica began in the same year. The speed matters for reading the architecture, because the church was designed from the start as a pilgrimage church for an already famous saint rather than adapted into one later. The ambulatory that runs around the sanctuary with chapels opening off it is the standard medieval solution for moving pilgrims past holy things in a continuous loop, and Padua has it because Padua needed it immediately.

The Long Build

Work went on through the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, with changes of plan visible in the fabric. The body was moved into the new church in 1263, which is the event described in section 9, and the building was substantially complete by around 1310, with the domes, the ambulatory and the transepts in place. Fittings, chapels and decoration then continued for six more centuries, which is why one church contains fourteenth-century fresco, fifteenth-century bronze, sixteenth-century marble and eighteenth-century baroque without any of it looking out of place.

Dates for the death in 1231, the canonisation on 30 May 1232, the start of building in 1232, the translation of 1263 and the substantial completion in the early fourteenth century follow the published history of the basilica issued by the Conventual Franciscan community that serves it and by the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio, the body that administers the fabric. The precise sequence of building campaigns is debated among architectural historians and this page gives the general chronology rather than a phase-by-phase attribution.

3. The Exterior: Domes, Towers, Facade

The outside of the basilica looks eastern, and the silhouette reads as Byzantine rather than as a Franciscan friary. Eight domes rise over the roofline, two slender bell towers stand behind them like minarets, and a brick facade with a row of arches faces the square. The effect is deliberate and it is old, and the closest family resemblance is to St Mark's in Venice, which was the great domed model in the region.

The Domes

The domes cover the nave bays, the crossing and the sanctuary, giving the interior its distinctive succession of round vaults rather than one continuous ceiling. The largest sits over the crossing. A second, taller cone rises over the sanctuary. Walking down the nave under them, the space seems to pulse open and closed, wide under each dome and narrow between them, which is a very different experience from the level tunnel of a French Gothic nave.

The Two Towers

Two thin brick bell towers stand at the east end, tapering to conical caps. They are frequently described as minaret-like, and the comparison is fair as a description of the silhouette. They belong to the medieval building campaigns and hold the bells of the basilica.

The Facade and the Square

The west front is brick, gabled, with a screen of pointed arches across it and a rose window above the central door. Compared with the domes it is plain, and it was left plain: no marble revetment was ever added. In front of it opens the Piazza del Santo, one of the large open spaces of Padua, which is where processions form on the feast and where the equestrian monument of Gattamelata stands, described in section 14.

4. The Plan Inside and How to Walk It

The interior is a Latin cross with a nave and two aisles, a broad crossing under the main dome, transepts to north and south, and a sanctuary ringed by an ambulatory with radiating chapels opening off it. Learning that plan in advance is the single most useful preparation for a visit, because the crowds move in fixed directions and a visitor who knows the shape can decide what to see rather than being carried past it.

The Standard Circuit

Most pilgrims follow the same loop. In through the west door, up the nave under the domes, left into the north transept for the Chapel of the Ark and the tomb, through the corridor behind the tomb with a hand on the stone, then round into the ambulatory, past the radiating chapels, into the Chapel of the Relics at the far east end behind the sanctuary, out along the other side of the ambulatory, into the south transept for the frescoed chapel of St James, and back down the nave. The high altar with the Donatello bronzes is seen from the crossing and from the ambulatory rail on the way round.

The Traffic Problem

A church like this has one permanent difficulty: the tomb attracts a queue, and the queue crosses the sanctuary at right angles to the liturgy. The medieval plan solves it by putting the shrine off the main axis, in a transept, with the ambulatory as a bypass. The result is that Mass can be celebrated at the high altar while a continuous line of people moves round behind it without disturbance. Do not walk across the front of the sanctuary when a liturgy is in progress, and do not stop dead in the tomb corridor. Both mistakes are made every day by well-meaning visitors, and both are easy to avoid once you know the plan.

Where to Sit

The nave has chairs and they are the best place in the building to actually pray at length. The tomb corridor is for a few seconds, the relic chapel is for a few minutes, and the nave is for as long as you like. Pilgrims who come out of the corridor with more to say can sit down in the nave and finish there.

5. The Chapel of the Ark and the Tomb

The Chapel of the Ark occupies the north transept, on the left as you face the high altar, and it holds the tomb of St Anthony. The Italian name, Cappella dell'Arca, uses the word for a chest or an ark, and it is exact: the remains lie in a stone chest set on the altar, under a canopy, with a metal grille and an inscription. The chapel around it is a room of white marble, wide, bright, and entirely covered from waist height upward with carved narrative panels.

How the Chapel Came to Look Like This

The present chapel is a Renaissance rebuilding of a medieval one. Work on it ran through the sixteenth century, with a succession of architects and sculptors, and the names attached to it are the leading sculptors working in the Veneto at the time: Tullio Lombardo and his brother Antonio Lombardo, Giovanni Maria Falconetto, Jacopo Sansovino, Danese Cattaneo and others. The chapel was designed as a single programme, a hall of marble with the tomb at the centre of one wall and the story of the saint's miracles running round it in nine large reliefs, described in the next section.

The attribution of the sixteenth-century chapel and its relief panels to Tullio Lombardo, Antonio Lombardo, Giovanni Maria Falconetto, Jacopo Sansovino, Danese Cattaneo and their collaborators follows the standard art-historical literature on the basilica and the documentation published by the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio, which holds the fabric records. Individual panels are attributed with differing degrees of confidence and some were finished by other hands.

The Altar and the Chest

The altar of the chapel stands against the wall, and the arca rests on it. Mass is celebrated here. The green-toned stone of the chest and the darker marble around it stand out against the white of the walls, which is one reason the tomb reads instantly as the focus of the room even to someone who has walked in knowing nothing. Candles burn in front, votive lamps hang above, and the floor in front of the altar is usually occupied by people kneeling.

The Corridor Behind

Behind the altar, between the tomb and the wall, runs a passage wide enough for two people abreast. This is the heart of the pilgrimage and the reason the chapel is built as it is. The passage lets the queue file along the back of the ark, touching the stone, without ever crossing in front of the people praying at the altar. The line is kept moving. Written petitions, photographs of the sick, letters and small objects are left on the ledges at either end, and the friars collect them.

6. The Custom of the Hand on the Tomb

The best-known pilgrim custom at Padua is simple: walking along the corridor behind the ark, you place your hand flat on the stone at the back of the tomb and pray while you pass. Nobody stops. The line moves at a slow walk, and most people hold contact for a few seconds. Many press their forehead to the marble as well. Some come back round and do it a second time.

What People Pray There

The prayers said at that wall are mostly petitions, in whatever language the person brought with them. People pray for the sick, for children, for a marriage, for work, for someone who has stopped believing, and for lost things, since Anthony has been invoked for what is lost since the Middle Ages and the association has never weakened. The Responsory attributed to St Bonaventure, Si quaeris miracula, If you seek miracles, is the traditional prayer text of the shrine, and its refrain asks Anthony to pray for the recovery of what has been lost.

Do It Well in Ten Seconds

Time at the wall is short and the queue behind you is real. Pilgrims who get something out of it decide before they enter the transept what they will say, and they keep it to one sentence. Name the person. Name the need. Ask Anthony to pray for it. Then take your hand off the stone and walk. Everything longer belongs in the nave chairs afterwards, where there is no queue and no marshal, and where you can pray at any length you like.

What Touching Does and Does Not Do

Contact with the stone has no automatic effect and the Church has never taught that it does. What is happening is an act of prayer, made physical, in the presence of the body of a man the Church has declared to be with God. Catholic practice has used the body in prayer since the beginning: kneeling, bowing, the sign of the cross, holding a rosary, kissing an icon. Touching a tomb belongs in that list. A person who is turned away by a closed chapel or who cannot travel to Padua has lost nothing that God gives, and the same petition said at a kitchen table is heard on the same terms.

The Petitions Left Behind

Look at the ledges. Folded notes, hospital photographs, printed prayers, children's drawings, and letters in a dozen languages accumulate there daily, and they are gathered up by the community. Standing in front of a heap of other people's requests is one of the quieter minutes in the building, and it is worth giving it a moment on the way out of the transept. It is a plain visual argument for the communion of saints: a stream of strangers, none of whom will meet, all asking one man to pray for them.

7. The Nine Marble Reliefs of the Miracles

The walls of the Chapel of the Ark carry nine large marble panels in high relief, each showing one miracle attributed to St Anthony, carved through the sixteenth century as a single programme. The art-historical literature ranks them with the most ambitious narrative reliefs of the Venetian Renaissance, and they are also, in practical terms, the reading matter of the queue: a pilgrim waiting to reach the tomb spends that time looking at them.

What They Show

The subjects are drawn from the miracle collections that grew up around the saint from the thirteenth century onward. Among them are the newborn child who spoke to clear his mother of an accusation, the young man whose severed foot was restored, the miser at whose funeral the heart was found in his strongbox, the drowned girl restored to life, and the jealous husband and his wounded wife. The scenes are set in deep architectural perspectives with crowds of onlookers, which is what makes them technically remarkable: the sculptors are competing with painting, pushing marble to produce receding rooms and distant figures.

Reading a Miracle Panel Honestly

These are devotional narratives from the hagiographic tradition, and the Church distinguishes carefully between miracles investigated and confirmed in a canonisation process and the wider body of stories that gathers around a popular saint over centuries. Catholic faith does not require a believer to hold every episode carved on the wall. What the Church does hold, and what these panels assume, is that God works miracles, that he has often worked them through the prayers of the saints, and that the miracles examined in a canonisation are attested. Our guide to miracles and how the Church investigates them covers the procedure and the standard of proof.

The identification of the panel subjects and their sixteenth-century sequence follows the published catalogues of the basilica and the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio. The miracle narratives themselves come from the medieval hagiographic tradition, principally the early lives of St Anthony and the later collections, and this page reports them as the subjects the sculptors were given rather than as verified events.

Why They Are Where They Are

Putting the miracles on the walls of the tomb chapel is an argument, and it is aimed at the person in the queue. The panels say that people in trouble asked this man to pray for them and were helped, and they say it directly above the heads of a crowd that is in the building for exactly that reason. Whatever a visitor makes of any individual story, the design is honest about what the room is for.

8. The Chapel of the Relics

The Chapel of the Relics stands at the far east end of the church, directly behind the sanctuary, at the head of the ambulatory, and it is where the relics of St Anthony are kept and shown. It is also called the Treasury Chapel, and it is the most theatrical room in the basilica: a tall, dark, coloured-marble interior with a semicircular tier of shelves rising behind the altar, carrying reliquaries in gold and silver, with sculpted figures and angels around and above them.

The Baroque Room

The chapel is late baroque work, designed in the last years of the seventeenth century by the Genoese sculptor Filippo Parodi and completed in the eighteenth. Parodi treated the whole room as a single sculpted composition, with the reliquaries staged on a rising curve like a theatre, statues of the virtues and of Franciscan figures standing among them, and the light arranged to fall on the gold. Coming into it from the plain grey and white of the ambulatory is a deliberate shock, and the shock is the point: the room is built to announce that what is kept in it is precious.

The design of the Chapel of the Relics is attributed to Filippo Parodi, with the campaign running from the 1690s into the eighteenth century, on the authority of the published history of the basilica and the records of the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio. Later alterations and additions to the fittings are documented in the same records.

What Is Displayed

The reliquaries hold the relics of St Anthony that were separated from the body at the successive canonical recognitions of the remains, together with objects associated with him. The best known are the relic venerated as his tongue, the relic of the chin, and the relic of the vocal apparatus. Also shown are portions of his habit and other items belonging to the shrine's treasury. Full recognitions of the remains were made in 1263, in 1350, and again in the twentieth century, and each produced a formal record.

The list of relics displayed and the fact of the canonical recognitions of the remains follow the accounts published by the Basilica of St Anthony and by the Conventual Franciscan community that serves it. This page does not give a piece-by-piece inventory or the findings of individual recognitions, which are set out in the basilica's own documentation.

Why the Church Keeps Relics at All

The veneration of relics rests on the Christian doctrine of the body. The Church holds that the body is part of the person, that it was sanctified in baptism, that the Holy Spirit dwelt in it, and that it will be raised. Honouring the remains of a saint follows from that, and Scripture already shows the instinct at work when the bones of Elisha are treated as bearing power (2 Kings 13:21) and when cloths that had touched Paul are carried to the sick (Acts 19:11-12). What the Church forbids is treating a relic as a charm or trading in relics. Our guide to the resurrection of the body sets out the doctrine that makes sense of the practice.

How to Behave in the Room

People fall silent here without being told. The friars ask for quiet, and restrictions on photography are posted in the church, so follow what is posted where you are standing. The reasonable way to use the room is to stand still for a minute, look at what is in front of you, pray once, and give the place to the next group. A visitor who wants a longer look at Franciscan relics in a quieter setting will find the same instinct at other Italian shrines, including the tomb of Carlo Acutis in Assisi, which draws its own crowds for the same reason.

9. The Tongue and the Translation of 1263

The tongue relic is the object most people have heard of before they arrive, and its story belongs to a single event: the translation of the body into the new church in 1263, thirty-two years after the death. The account handed down by the Franciscans is that when the grave was opened, in the presence of the Franciscan minister general, the flesh had returned to dust while the tongue was found whole and red.

What the Account Says

St Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, then minister general of the Franciscan Order and later a Doctor of the Church, presided at the translation. According to the tradition preserved at the basilica, when the tongue was lifted from the remains Bonaventure took it in his hands and addressed it, blessing the tongue that had always praised the Lord and had made others praise him, and declaring that its preservation showed what merit the man had before God. The relic was then set apart and preserved, and it has been kept and shown at Padua since. Bonaventure was Anthony's fellow Franciscan and one of the leading theologians of the thirteenth century.

What the Church Claims and What It Does Not

The Church has issued no scientific determination about the relic and does not require any Catholic to hold a particular view of its physical condition. The tongue is venerated, and veneration is directed to the saint, not to the tissue. Bodily preservation has never been treated by the Church as proof of holiness, which is why it forms no part of the canonisation procedure. A great many canonised saints decayed normally, and some bodies that resisted decay belonged to people the Church has never canonised. The honest statement is that the friars of Padua have preserved and displayed this relic since 1263 on the strength of what was recorded at the translation, and that its significance is devotional.

The narrative of the 1263 translation, the presence of St Bonaventure and his words over the tongue come from the Franciscan tradition preserved and published by the Basilica of St Anthony. The earliest written accounts postdate the event and this page reports the tradition as the shrine transmits it rather than asserting an independently verified sequence of events.

Why the Tongue in Particular

The symbolic force of the relic is what has carried it. Anthony's whole public work was speech. He was a preacher who drew crowds too large for churches, sent by Francis of Assisi to teach theology to the friars, and he was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XII in 1946 with the title Evangelical Doctor. A preserved tongue in the middle of a preacher's shrine is a compact statement about what his life was spent on. Our profile of St Anthony of Padua covers the preaching career and the doctorate; our page on St Francis of Assisi covers the order he joined.

10. Donatello's High Altar

The high altar of the basilica carries a group of bronze sculptures made by Donatello, who came from Florence to Padua in 1443 and stayed for about a decade. The literature on Donatello treats the Paduan altar as one of the major concentrations of his bronze work surviving in a single setting, and it is the reason a great many people who have no interest in relics come into this building at all.

What Donatello Made

The commission produced a seated Madonna and Child at the centre, six standing bronze saints around her, a large bronze crucifix, four narrative reliefs of miracles of St Anthony in the flattened perspectival technique Donatello had made his own, a Lamentation over the dead Christ, the symbols of the four evangelists, and a set of small relief angels playing and singing. The six saints are the Franciscan and Paduan company the church would expect: Francis of Assisi, Anthony himself, Louis of Toulouse, and the local patrons Justina, Daniel and Prosdocimus.

The Reliefs

The four miracle reliefs are the technical heart of the group. Donatello sets each scene in a huge architectural space filled with a churning crowd, and he does it in bronze relief only a few millimetres deep, using perspective and graded modelling to produce depth that is not physically there. The subjects are the miracles of the mule that knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, the newborn child who spoke, the repentant son whose foot was restored, and the miser's heart found in his money chest. The same episodes appear in marble in the tomb chapel, so a visitor can compare two schools of sculpture handling identical stories a century apart.

What Was Lost and What Was Rebuilt

The altar has not survived in its original arrangement. It was dismantled, and its parts were reassembled in a new setting in the later nineteenth century under the architect Camillo Boito. The bronzes are Donatello's; the structure holding them is not, and no securely documented record of the fifteenth-century arrangement survives, so reconstructions of the original layout remain proposals. Standing at the ambulatory rail, a visitor is looking at authentic Donatello figures in a Victorian frame.

Donatello's presence in Padua from 1443, the components of the altar and its nineteenth-century reassembly under Camillo Boito are the standard account in the literature on Donatello and in the documentation of the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio. The original arrangement of the altar is reconstructed differently by different scholars and this page does not adopt one reconstruction.

11. The Presbytery Bronzes and the Candlestick

The sanctuary holds a second and less famous group of bronzes made after Donatello left, by sculptors who had worked in or around his Paduan workshop, and one of them is among the finest pieces of Renaissance bronze work in the region.

The Paschal Candlestick

Standing in the presbytery is a bronze paschal candlestick several metres tall, made by Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, in the early sixteenth century. It is covered from base to top with figures, reliefs, sphinxes, satyrs, garlands and inscriptions, worked at a level of fineness that has to be looked at closely to be believed. Its programme mixes Christian and classical imagery in the manner of Paduan humanism, which was the intellectual world of the university across the city. A single candlestick took years of work and it shows.

The Old Testament Reliefs

Around the choir are bronze relief panels of Old Testament subjects by Bartolomeo Bellano and by Riccio, made in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They continue the pictorial relief tradition Donatello had established in the city, and they give the sanctuary a coherent bronze character that is unusual in a church of any period.

The Choir and the Screens

The sanctuary furnishings have changed repeatedly, in the nineteenth-century campaign and again in the twentieth century with the liturgical reform, and the arrangement of altar, choir and screens is a modern one. Fires and rebuildings have also taken their toll on the fittings of the church over the centuries. What has been protected throughout is the sculpture.

The attribution of the paschal candlestick to Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, and of the choir reliefs to Bartolomeo Bellano and Riccio follows the standard literature on Paduan Renaissance bronze and the catalogues published by the basilica. Dates for the candlestick campaign vary slightly between sources and this page gives the early sixteenth century rather than a single year.

12. The Frescoed Chapels of the Transepts

Two chapels inside the basilica carry complete fourteenth-century fresco cycles in their original places, which is rare, and they are the reason the basilica forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage inscription covering the painted interiors of Padua.

The Chapel of St James in the South Transept

The chapel that closes the south transept, commissioned in the 1370s by the soldier and courtier Bonifacio Lupi, was frescoed by Altichiero da Zevio together with Jacopo Avanzi. Its dominating image is a vast Crucifixion filling the end wall in three linked scenes, with a crowd of horsemen, soldiers, mourners and onlookers spread across a wide landscape. Around it run scenes from the life of St James the Great. Altichiero's crowds are individual faces rather than types, and the chapel is one of the places where fourteenth-century painting in the Veneto is at its strongest.

The Chapel of Blessed Luca Belludi

Opening off the north transept, beside the Chapel of the Ark, is a chapel frescoed in 1382 by Giusto de' Menabuoi, the painter of the great baptistery ceiling beside the Paduan cathedral. It holds the tomb of Blessed Luca Belludi, the friar who was Anthony's companion and close associate in his Paduan years and who outlived him by decades. The frescoes show scenes of the apostles Philip and James along with an episode in which Anthony appears to Belludi to promise the liberation of Padua, painted with the tight, luminous clarity Giusto is known for.

The UNESCO Inscription

In 2021 UNESCO inscribed a serial property covering the fourteenth-century fresco cycles of Padua on the World Heritage List, under the name Padua's fourteenth-century fresco cycles. The inscription groups a set of painted buildings across the city, including the Basilica of St Anthony and the Oratory of St George beside it, alongside the Scrovegni Chapel with the frescoes of Giotto.

Source: the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which publishes the 2021 inscription of the serial property covering Padua's fourteenth-century fresco cycles and the list of component sites it includes.

13. The Madonna Mora and the Older Church

Opening off the north transept is a chapel that is older than the basilica around it. This is the surviving part of Santa Maria Mater Domini, the small church of the Franciscan community where Anthony was buried in 1231, swallowed by the great church that grew up over his grave. Standing in it, a visitor is inside the building the whole basilica exists because of.

The Statue

The chapel takes its usual name from the statue it holds, the Madonna Mora, a stone figure of the Virgin and Child carved at the end of the fourteenth century by a French sculptor working in Padua, Rinaldino di Puydarrieux. The name refers to the dark tone of the stone. Beside it is a further chapel usually called that of the Black Madonna, containing an older venerated image of the Virgin. Neither image is connected with any reported apparition. They are venerated images in the ordinary Catholic sense, honoured for what they represent, and no claim of a supernatural event attaches to them.

The attribution of the Madonna Mora to Rinaldino di Puydarrieux at the end of the fourteenth century, and the identification of the chapel with the surviving fabric of Santa Maria Mater Domini, follow the published guides to the basilica and the records of the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio.

Images, Apparitions and the Difference

Visitors who have been to Marian shrines elsewhere sometimes assume that any famous statue of the Virgin implies a reported apparition. Padua is a useful corrective. The Madonna Mora is a work of art in a chapel, loved for six centuries, with no apparition claim behind it, and that is the ordinary case across the Catholic world. Where apparitions are reported, the Church judges them under a specific procedure, and since May 2024 that procedure is set out in the norms published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, under which the Church ordinarily does not declare an apparition supernatural at all. Our guide to Marian apparition sites and their actual status explains the six possible conclusions and applies them case by case.

The Tomb of Gattamelata

Also inside the church is the funerary monument of Erasmo da Narni, the condottiere known as Gattamelata, who commanded the armies of Venice and died in 1443, together with a monument to his son. He is buried in the basilica, in the chapel now used as the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, and his far more famous bronze likeness stands outside in the square. A mercenary captain's tomb inside a Franciscan shrine is a reminder that these churches were civic buildings as well as devotional ones, paid for and used by the whole city.

14. The Cloisters, the Museums, the Piazza

The basilica is the centre of a complex that runs well beyond the church walls, and the parts outside the church are where a visitor finds quiet, shade and somewhere to sit down.

The Cloisters

Four cloisters lie along the south side of the church, of different dates and characters, including the cloister of the novitiate, the general chapter cloister, and the cloister named after the magnolia tree in its garden. They connect the friary buildings, the chapter house, the library and the museums. Fragments of tombs, inscriptions and architectural sculpture are set into the walls, and the general chapter cloister preserves medieval painting. Ten minutes here after the tomb corridor does more for most pilgrims than another circuit inside.

The Museo Antoniano and the Library

The complex holds the Museo Antoniano, which displays works removed from the church for conservation along with objects from the treasury and votive material given over the centuries, and a substantial library and archive belonging to the community. Together they are where the history of the shrine is kept in a form a researcher can use.

The Oratory of St George and the Scoletta

In the square beside the basilica stand two small buildings that reward a detour. The Oratory of St George, built in the 1370s as a funerary chapel for Raimondino Lupi di Soragna, is frescoed throughout by Altichiero da Zevio, and it is a single painted room of the first quality. Next to it, the Scoletta del Santo, the meeting house of the confraternity of St Anthony, has an upper hall with a cycle of paintings of the saint's miracles by sixteenth-century Venetian painters, including early work by Titian.

The attribution of the Oratory of St George frescoes to Altichiero da Zevio, and of paintings in the upper hall of the Scoletta del Santo to Titian among other sixteenth-century painters, follows the standard literature and the published documentation of the buildings. Individual panels in the Scoletta are attributed with varying confidence.

The Gattamelata Monument

In the middle of the piazza stands Donatello's bronze equestrian monument to Gattamelata, cast in the 1440s and early 1450s, showing the captain in armour on a heavy horse on a high stone base. The standard art-historical account treats it as the first large-scale bronze equestrian monument cast since antiquity, taking the imperial Roman type and giving it to a hired soldier of a modern republic. Most visitors walk straight past it toward the church door. Turn round on the way out and look at it.

15. Who Owns and Runs the Basilica

The Basilica of St Anthony is served by the Conventual Franciscans, administered as a fabric by a lay body, and supervised for the Holy See by a pontifical delegate. Three distinct authorities, and knowing which is which explains a good deal about how the building is run.

The division of responsibility between the Conventual Franciscan community, the Veneranda Arca di Sant'Antonio and the Pontifical Delegate is set out in the basilica's own published account of its governance. The precise legal arrangements have changed over the centuries and this table describes the present general shape rather than reproducing the governing statutes.

Why It Is Not the Cathedral

A church can be far bigger, older and more famous than the cathedral of its city and still not be the cathedral, because a cathedral is defined by one thing only: it holds the seat, the cathedra, of the bishop. Padua's cathedral is Santa Maria Assunta, with the celebrated baptistery beside it. The basilica is a shrine church of an order, and the distinction is the same one that separates the papal basilicas of Rome from the ordinary parish churches around them, covered in our guide to the four papal basilicas of Rome.

The Friars You Will Actually Meet

The visible work of the community is confessions and Mass. Confessionals in the basilica are staffed in a range of languages, and confession is a large part of what the friars do here, for the plain reason that people arriving at a tomb to ask for something often decide to deal with something else first. If you go to Padua, that is the opportunity worth taking. Our guide to confession and how to make a good one covers what to do if it has been a long time.

16. The Feast, the Tredicina and the Bread

The feast of St Anthony falls on 13 June, the anniversary of his death, and it is the day the basilica and the city are given over entirely to him. Several devotions of long standing are tied to the shrine, and a pilgrim who knows them will understand what is going on in the church at the times of year they are kept.

13 June

The feast brings processions through Padua, an outdoor Mass, and crowds that fill the piazza. The statue and the relics are carried in procession. Lilies are blessed and distributed, a custom associated with Anthony and reflected in the lily he holds in most images of him. For a pilgrim, the feast is the most impressive day to be in Padua and the worst day to try to reach the tomb quietly. Choose according to what you want.

The Thirteen Tuesdays

The Tredicina, the devotion of thirteen consecutive Tuesdays leading up to the feast, is the principal prayer practice attached to St Anthony. Tuesday was chosen because Anthony was buried on a Tuesday. The devotion consists of prayers, readings and works of charity kept each Tuesday for thirteen weeks, and it is widely practised in Italy, Latin America, the Philippines and wherever Franciscan missions carried it. Many parishes also keep a shorter novena in the thirteen days before the feast.

St Anthony's Bread

The charitable work associated with the saint is called St Anthony's Bread, a practice of giving alms for the poor in thanksgiving for a favour asked through his intercession. Its modern form began in nineteenth-century France, at Toulon, where a shopkeeper named Louise Bouffier promised bread for the poor if a jammed lock could be opened through Anthony's prayers, and the practice spread from there into a worldwide charitable fund administered by Franciscan communities including the one at Padua.

The origin of St Anthony's Bread at Toulon with Louise Bouffier in the nineteenth century is the account published by the Franciscan communities that administer the charity, including the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua. The devotion of the Thirteen Tuesdays and the blessing of lilies are long-established Franciscan customs documented in the shrine's own material.

Praying Padua Without Going to Padua

Most people who have a devotion to St Anthony will never stand in that corridor, and the Church has never taught that presence at a shrine is required for the grace of what it commemorates. Intercession is not geographic. The Responsory can be said at a bus stop, the Tredicina can be kept in a kitchen, and the alms of St Anthony's Bread can be given from anywhere. Our guide to keeping a pilgrimage from home sets out how the tradition understands that, and our overview of Catholic pilgrimage sites worldwide will help if you are choosing between destinations.

Nothing sold on this site affects that either. Buying anything from us changes no one's standing before God, adds nothing to a prayer, and is not required to pray at Padua or anywhere else. What we sell is audio, study material and playlists that save a reader the work of assembling the Padua texts alone. Say the Responsory from memory and you have lost nothing.

17. Frequently Asked Questions