Church of Saint Mary 'Antica'

The guide to the Church of Saint Mary Antica in Verona begins with an unusual fact: its main door was torn out and a new one cut into the side wall, so worshippers now pass beneath a stone coffin belonging to Cangrande della Scala, the warlord who once ruled the city. It traces the building back to a small eighth-century Lombard chapel destroyed by an earthquake in eleven seventeen, and to the striped tuff-and-brick church raised in its place by eleven eighty-five. Masons chose that banded pattern because tuff was cheap but weak, leaning on brick for the real structural weight. Look for the scrap of black and white mosaic floor still surviving underfoot from the older chapel.