Church of San Fermo Maggiore

The Church of San Fermo Maggiore in Verona is built around a carpenter's gamble: an upturned wooden ceiling shaped like a ship's hull, raised in a landlocked city by Franciscan builders in the early thirteen hundreds. The guide follows how they borrowed a shipwright's solution to roof a wide Gothic hall without stone vaulting, and the painters who later covered every rib with saints and musician angels. It also turns to a quieter corner of the church, where a young Pisanello left one of his earliest surviving frescoes beside a tomb carved by a Florentine sculptor. Look up first, then head for the left wall.