We went to Strasbourg on a day trip from our holiday house in the Vosges mountains, Alsace. Situated on the west bank of the Rhine it is a symbol of the history of Franco-German relations: for many years adversarial but since WWII collaborative and peaceful.
We had been two days prior to the smaller city of Colmar, which in many ways is very similar to Strasbourg. In fact it is prettier and could easily hold its own as a World Heritage Site, though there seem no plans for it become one. Both have chocolate-box city centres (Little Venice in Colmar and Petite France in Strasbourg) made up of timber-framed houses on tributaries of the Rhine (the Leuch in Colmar and the Ill in Strasbourg). Although in France they are both much more in the vernacular of a German medieval town, and put me in mind of Bamberg.
Founded by the Romans, Strasbourg was part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1681 when the Alsace was conquered by Louis XIV. After its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 France handed it over to the new nation of Germany , which held it until the 1918 Treaty of Versaille made it French once more. The region was briefly German again when seized in 1940 but reverted to France in 1944 and has remained that way since.
Finally putting their differences aside the two countries made Strasbourg one of the EU’s three capitals in 1952. To this day the entire European Parliament and its caravan decamps from Brussels to Strasbourg for one week in every four, causing plenty of needless inefficiency but ensuring the city remains a symbol of co-operation rather than enmity.
The WHS inscription originally pertained only to the Grande-Île – that is, the medieval centre with its large Gothic cathedral. It was extended in 2017 to include the Neustadt – or new town – which claims to have been inspired by Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the 19th century. This area is less interesting for the tourist, but doesn’t detract from the whole.
What our little tourists really wanted, of course, was not well laid-out street patterns or a glimpse of the Council of Europe’s headquarters but ice cream and a roundabout ride – and this being a holiday I was happy to oblige.
After an evening in the charming Romano-German city of Trier we set off alongside the Moselle before heading up into the pretty but parched countryside of Rhineland-Palatinate. An hour or so later we crossed the regional border into Saarland, the smallest German state (excepting the city-states of Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg). A heavily industrialised area centred on the Saar river, the Saarland has long been contested by France and Germany. Mostly Germany has had the upper hand but between 1920 and 1935 it was occupied by France and Britain according to the Treaty of Versailles. It was because of sites exactly like Völklingen that the victors sought to keep the region out of German control, for this was the age of steel and steel was imperative for the production of guns, shells and tanks.
burden shed (for storage of iron ore)
Built in the late 19th century – a period of rapid innovation in industrial metallurgy – Völklingen was a monster of an ironworks. It had six blast furnaces, making it larger than any plant operating in Europe today (a blast furnace is the most expensive and most critical part of an iron / steel mill; Germany’s largest mill today, operated by ThyssenKrupp in Duisburg has four; Britain’s largest, the Port Talbot site currently being shut down by owners Tata Steel, has two). When production ceased in 1986 it was decided to preserve Völklingen as a museum, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1994.
upper bell (top of a blast furnace from the charging platform)
Völklingen is a unique monument to turn-of-the-20th-century iron production since it was a) not significantly modified or upgraded after the 1930s, and b) not torn down for development after its closure.
The site is a cathedral to that important but often overlooked period of European history, the Industrial Revolution. Since iron ore was first smelted with coke at Ironbridge in 1705, scientists and industrialists iterated improvements to the process and sought scale benefits by building ever larger and more efficient production sites. The heart of the plant was its fleet of blast furnaces, which took in vast quantities of iron ore and smelted to produce pig iron. This would then be converted via the Bessemer or Siemens-Martin process to purge it of impurities and turn it into steel.
somewhere beneath the burden shed
The efforts of the Versaille-imposed occupation ultimately amounted to little when a revanchist Germany set its eyes on reunification in the 1930s. Hitler encouraged a plebiscite, the people of the Saar voted overwhelmingly in favour and the return was rubber stamped by the League of Nations in 1935. It was poignant walking about the derelict site to think that this was once (more accurately twice) the heart of the German war machine, churning out materials being used to subjugate Europe. In WW2 prisoners were forced to labour here and there is an eerie memorial to them in the Blower hall.
The town of Völklingen is watched over by two massive slag heaps that almost blend into the landscape as nature patiently works to reclaim them. Nearby too is a modern steel mill making wire rod for tyre cord and suspension springs, but instead of getting its pig iron from the shuttered ironworks it receives molten iron by rail from a plant 15 miles away. The area is still pretty industrialised, located in what Eurocrats refer to as the SaarLorLux region of Saarland, Luxembourg and Lorraine.
the distinctive downcomers (for hot gas exhaust)
For us the site was reminiscent of Zollverein, a former coal mine and industrial complex in Essen and a fellow WHS. From a visitor’s standpoint Völklingen gives you more freedom to roam almost wherever you like, with most of the cavernous buildings having multiple accessible levels. The only restriction is that you need to don a hard hat to explore some of the upper levels of the blast furnaces. There were times when we felt like the only people visiting and indeed we got lost for quite a while underneath the Burden Shed, struggling to work out how it connected up with the rest of the plant!
At the end of a blisteringly hot summer’s day when finally we found our way back to the visitor centre there was a chance to cool off with an alkoholfrei beer before continuing on the final leg of our road trip toward the hills of the Vosges.
Trier, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, is a small and easily-overlooked German city that just happens to host the most complete assemblage of Roman ruins north of the Alps. The reason? From AD 293 it was one of the four capitals of the Tetrarchy, a system devised under the emperor Diocletian that devolved power in order to better defend the sprawling empire from neighbouring rivals. The other capitals were Nicomedia (modern İzmit in Turkey), Sirmium (near Belgrade) and Mediolanum (nowadays Milan). Trier was known as Augusta Treverorum, and though it sits astride the River Moselle, its main role was to defend the nearby Rhine from barbarian invaders.
Porta Nigra
The magnificent Porta Nigra, an imposing Roman gate, was one of the first things we saw after entering Trier in heavy traffic on a sunny Saturday evening. We were staying on Simeonstrasse, the main shopping street and just a stone’s throw from the gate, which is so-named because of the blackening of its stone over time. On arrival there was just time to enjoy a Radler (German shandy) and take a few pictures before bed. The Trier World Heritage Site is made up of 9 sub-sites scattered around the city and the next morning we set off to see some of the others.
Basilica of Constantine
The Aula Palatina, or Constantine Basilica, was built during the reigns of Constantinius the Pale (305-306 AD) and Constantine the Great (306-336 AD) – the latter of whom famously converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. The building has been reconstructed over time, and though it is now used as one it wasn’t built as a church but a basilica in the Roman sense, meaning town hall.
Imperial Baths
Also dating from the days of Constantine are the Imperial Baths, a grand complex and one of three in Trier – showing how seriously the Romans took their ablutions. Located at the end of a park next to a dual carriageway I felt more could be done to showcase this site properly.
Amphitheatre
The amphitheatre is better looked-after, and though you have to pay to see it the ticket isn’t much. Built into the city walls, it could accommodate 20,000 spectators and is the tenth largest Roman amphitheatre extant. Michael enjoyed the experience of hearing his voice echo back at us, such are the acoustics of the arena.
Cathedral of St Peter
Back in the city centre two more of the highlights are direct neighbours of each other. The Cathedral of St Peter is the oldest church in Germany and contains a relic claimed to be the robe that Jesus wore on the cross.
Next door is the Liebfrauenkirche (German for Church of our Lady), which was the first church outside France to be built in the High Gothic style. It was completed after Chartres, but before Reims and Amiens. To me it looks a lot plainer than those three, though UNESCO praises its ‘unity of style’ due to the fact it was completed in a breakneck 30 years.
Cathedral of St Peter (left) and Church of Our Lady (right)
Trier is also known as the birthplace of Karl Marx, but I’m not a huge fan of his so didn’t bother seeking out his house. After one night and having seen the main sights of Trier it was time to get back on the road and make progress toward the Alsace. But on the way, another German stop was planned for a bit of more recent history at the Völklingen Ironworks in the Saarland.
In 2021 UNESCO inscribed a new World Heritage Site under the name Great Spa Towns of Europe, which includes 11 spa towns in 7 countries that showcase the European spa culture that developed from the early 18th century to the 1930s. Bath is one of them, but also retains its inscription in its own right under City of Bath – putting it in the unusual position of being included twice on the UNESCO list. The other 10 are Baden bei Wien (Austria); Spa (Belgium); Františkovy Lázně; Karlovy Vary; Mariánské Lázně (Czechia); Vichy (France); Bad Ems; Baden-Baden; Bad Kissingen (Germany) and Montecatini Terme (Italy). Including Bath I’ve now been to two of them and I reckon that (just about) justifies writing a to-be-updated post on the WHS.
Spa (Belgium)
Visit: 10 June 2023
This year our summer holiday was again by car to France. In 2022 we had stayed in the Loire Valley with our friends the French family (who are English), but in 2023 we were heading to the Alsace to meet my parents. With young kids driving there in one go is out of the question, so I planned a leisurely three day journey via the Low Countries and Germany. After spending a Friday night in Maastricht in the far southeast of the Netherlands (because the Dutch do parkrun and the Belgians do not!) we paid a visit to the town of Spa in the Belgian region of Wallonia.
It is in some sense the ‘original’ spa town, in that it gave its name to the concept of natural mineral baths with supposedly restorative qualities. Like most (all?) of the Great Spa Towns of Europe, it was originally a Roman spa town – though we didn’t see much evidence of the Romans during our admittedly brief visit.
This jumping character known as Pierrot was all over the town and is the mascot of the local brand of mineral water (called – guess what – Spa) which is ubiquitous across Benelux. Michael and I had fun spotting them as we followed the tourist office’s recommended walking trail.
My overall impression of the place was of a quiet but well-maintained resort town whose draw has probably faded a little since the advent of domestic hot water in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the past it attracted the good and the great from across Europe, including Brits as notable as Charles II, the Duke of Wellington, Churchill and presumably at some point Agatha Christie, for her most famous character, Hercule Poirot, was born here in Spa.
It was a hot day – one of many in what would be a record-breakingly hot summer for much of the world (with the exception of the UK, it turned out!) – so the fountains jetting cool Spa water up from the pavement were a welcome treat for kids. The grown-ups had to settle for a bottle of jumping Pierrot’s mineral water or a glass of Jupiler before it was time to get back in the car and venture across another border into Rhineland-Palatinate for our next destination, Trier.
The city of Lyon sits at the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône rivers, west of the Alps about two thirds of the way down France. It has been prominent since Roman times when it was known as Lugdunum, the capital of Gaul after it had been suppressed by Julius Caesar in the Gallic Wars of 58-50 BC.
We arrived on a Friday afternoon amid intermittent showers before embarking on a river cruise that took us up the Saône as far as an ait called Île Barbe. It was not a cruise that showcased the city at its best, I thought, for the most noticeable feature of the cityscape was graffiti up and down the riverbanks.
not on a riverbank but illustrates my point
The UNESCO inscription applauds Lyon’s ‘authenticity’ in showcasing successive periods of town planning, from the Roman ruins of the amphitheatre via the medieval streets on the slopes of Fourvière to the Renaissance dwellings of Vieux-Lyon. Showcasing two millennia of urban environment, rather than rebuilding itself periodically, it developed progressively eastward.
Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls
The city centre, where the rivers meet, sits between two hills to the east and west. We walked up the western one, the Fourvière, where Lyon’s basilica proudly overlooks the landscape. Climbing the many steps we were passed by runners and walkers (and run-walkers) participating in an ultra-marathon that appeared to involve many laps up and down the hill.
view from the Fourvière
Hills awaited us to the north, as well, up which we hiked for what seemed like miles in search of a pizza restaurant Ross or KC had found on the internet (overrated, it turned out). Again, the graffiti was everywhere. I assumed it was related to the recent unrest over pension reforms, but when I went to Paris two weeks later there was nothing of the sort on the buildings there.
Vieux-Lyon
Lyon is known for its haute cuisine, but for the more modest-of-means there is the bouchon, a Lyonnaise variant of the bistro that serves inexpensive fare traditional to the region – dishes such as salade Lyonnaise (lettuce with bacon, croutons, mustard dressing, and a poached egg), andouilette sausages and St Marcellin cheese. I must confess to being unimpressed with the traditional pike perch in a Nantua sauce, not having realised that the dish comprises quenelles (‘creamed’ fish formed into a sort of mousse and fried) rather than fillets.
a take on the Salade Lyonnaise
The city seemed to have several lively districts at night. We spent most of Friday evening in cafes and bars by the Saône before heading uptown for the later-closing venues of the 1st arrondissement. I didn’t have the energy to repeat it all on Saturday night so turned in early, but the upside was that I was up early enough on Sunday to see the Musée des Beaux-Arts.
Lyon Cathedral
In addition to a basilica Lyon also boasts a cathedral, built over several centuries from 1180-1476 (in contrast to the rapidly-constructed cathedral at Chartres, which I had visited the previous year). Despite this it is lauded for the uniformity of its style, and has featured in the works of both both Turner and Degas. To me the lack of spires and the relatively plain frontage didn’t leave much of an impression, but it’s nice to see some variety at least.
After two nights the trip was over and it was time to head back home – though it wouldn’t be long before I was back in France: first to Paris for a conference (no WHS posts this time) and then another fortnight later for our big family summer holiday to the Alsace (don’t worry – several posts to come from that one).
Reims was the last stop on our 2022 summer holiday in France, about halfway between Fontainebleau and the coast. At the centre of the Champagne region, it is a fairly large city and finding parking suitable for a car with a roofbox was no mean feat. Eventually I lost patience and drove into an underground multistory with even less clearance than I’d bargained for, wondering as I inched forward how much the French car parking authorities charge for extrication. Once settled though we took the chance to unwind and visit the cathedral.
The 13th/14th century cathedral, influenced by Chartres, is considered a masterpiece of the High Gothic. The way that the many sculptures were ‘designed in’ to the structure of the building influenced many other cathedrals in turn, particularly across the Rhine in Germany.
Inside the cathedral a highlight is the beautiful stained glass windows, which captivated the children, Michael and Ophelia. 25 royal coronations took place in the cathedral, so a sumptuous interior was quite appropriate.
Adjacent to the cathedral is the Palace of Tau, former residence of the archbishop of Reims. It was here that the king (France only ever crowned kings as women were forbidden from becoming Queen regnant) slept, prayed and feasted while staying in the city for his coronation. Unfortunately for us it was covered in scaffolding.
The final element of this WHS is the Abbey of Saint-Rémi, located away from the other two buildings to the south of the city centre. It was once the largest Romanesque building in northern France before being ‘updated’ in the Gothic era (the twiddly bits on the little spires). Despite its distance from the cathedral it was used as part of the coronation processions, being the location of both start and end. The photo above is not of its more famous west face, but I took this early in the morning when the sun was shining brightly from the east.
Another interesting feature of Reims is this Roman arch, the Porte du Mars. It was the widest arch in the Roman empire, back when the city was known as Durocortorum. Today it sits in a city park called the Hautes Promenades, a rectangular oasis of calm from the bustling and not-particularly-likeable centre of the city.
Packing up after one night we headed back for Calais, stopping for lunch in the town of Cambrai. This first foreign holiday with kids had been a success and would inspire a similar summer trip the following year. Plenty of WHS left to see in France!
As we came toward the end of our 2022 summer holiday we, along with Ross’s family, checked out of our house in the Loire and began the journey home. Though the drive to Calais can be done in about six hours, we had a more leisurely two-night journey planned, stopping first in Fontainebleau and then in Reims. The route took us from the parched Centre region northeast to the noticeably greener Île-de-France. Fontainebleau was supposed to be the location of the second parkrun of our trip (the other was meant to be in Rouen), but we had the misfortune of travelling to France the very day that a nationwide suspension of the event was announced due to some bureaucratic rubbish about health insurance. A year later this remains the case.
The town, 30 miles southeast of Paris, is home of the business school INSEAD, but is most famous for the royal palace that sits at its centre. Originally the site of a hunting lodge for French kings in the 12th century, it was transformed into a palace by Francis I in the early 16th century. It was here that ‘the Sun King’ Louis XIV signed the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1762, expelling the Huguenots and causing what was probably England’s first refugee crisis. But Fontainebleau’s most infamous resident in my mind was the Emperor Napoleon, whose throne room is preserved, below.
The site is a grand palace, built by Italian artists combining Renaissance and French artistic traditions. I found the Napoleonic artefacts most interesting. Having recently gotten through a biography of him it was helpful to see figures from the era (Ney, Augereau, Joséphine), brought to life by their portraits hanging in the corridors. The palace also features the room in which he signed his abdication before his exile to Elba.
Despite the charms of the Loire’s chateaux, I distinctly recall thinking Fontainebleau was my favourite WHS of the trip – but because I’ve left it a year before writing up this post I am struggling to explain exactly why. Probably the historical connections to France’s most significant figure, the ornate internal decorations and the lack of crowds which made for an interesting and relaxed visit.
The main portion of our joint summer holiday with the French family in 2022 was spent at a gîte in the Loire. We stayed for 5 nights in a house outside the small village of Esvres, south of Tours, which served as a convenient base for exploring some of the highlights of the Loire Valley. Famous for its chateaux, UNESCO has inscribed an area along the river roughly from the city of Angers in the west to Orléans in the east, with Tours in the centre. The official description contains the usual pompous stuff about the interaction between man and nature, but really it’s about the fancy houses and picturesque old towns.
The first of those we visited was the Château de Chenonceau, built in a showy late Gothic / early Renaissance style across not the Loire but the Cher – a tributary to the south. It passed through the hands of various wives and widows of nobles and royals but is today belongs to the scions of a chocolate dynasty who keep it open to the public. We enjoyed the well-kept gardens and the hedge maze, though Michael’s chief interest was of course in a tractor belonging to the groundsman!
We next visited Tours, the provincial capital named after the Turoni, a Gallic tribe put down by the Romans under Caesar. Too large to be entirely charming, it has a pleasant centre with a Flamboyant Gothic cathedral that the children enjoyed more than the adults. We had lunch at a bistro in Place Plumereau, a square flanked with medieval buildings but in the afternoon it became unbearably hot so we cut off our visit and headed back to the house, taking note as we passed on the clamshell indicating we were on one of the routes to Santiago de Compostela.
The following day we visited the Gardens at Villandry, probably my highlight of the Loire. The Château de Villandry, like Chenonceau, is a 16th century building and has passed through various hands over the centuries including Napoleon’s brother, Jérôme Bonaparte. In the 1840s the formal French gardens were torn out and replaced with an English-style country park – but at the turn of the 20th century the property was purchased by an American heiress and the extremely manicured French garden we see today was reinstated. We were there in the middle of an epic drought and I can only imagine how much watering these ornate hedgerows needed.
The last place we visited in this WHS was Amboise, on the drive out of the Loire up toward our next destination at Fontainebleu. This small town sits about 15 miles east of Tours on the Loire river and features a prominent castle looming over the hubbub of the tourist trade in its ancient streets. Once the site of the French royal court, it was from 1548 the childhood home of Mary, Queen of Scots after her betrothal to the 4-year-old son of France’s King Henry II when she was only 5. Amboise was also the place of death of Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, who spent his final years here in the service of Francis I.
In summer 2022 Natalie, Michael and I stayed in the Loire Valley for a week with Ross and his family. Making the most of the drive we stopped on the way down in Boulogne, Rouen and Chartres – the last of which is famous for its 12th century cathedral. The church was among the first cohort of World Heritage Sites in 1979, inscribed as one of the best-preserved Gothic cathedrals in Europe. Its two spires stand tall amid a flat landscape, clearly visible from far away as we approached from the northeast.
the cathedrals we saw on this trip
We had spent the night before in Rouen and been greatly impressed by its cathedral in the evening light. I don’t know why it isn’t also a WHS, as it is almost as old as Chartres and has a much more ornate western face. I think it should be one, but I don’t make the rules.
Rouen Cathedral
Chartres however is on the list primarily due to the unity of its style, a result of its having been completed in a few decades (relatively fast by medieval standards). And because it was one of the first of its scale, it influenced the design of other notable cathedrals including fellow World Heritage Sites Reims, Cologne, Amiens and Westminster.
Parking in Chartres wasn’t without its difficulties – forgetting I had a roofbox on the car I almost drove into an underground carpark, having to reverse back up the downramp on realising my mistake! We eventually found a spot on a side street some distance from the centre, and, uncertain whether we would return to find a parking ticket on the windscreen, wandered off through the ancient stone streets for the cathedral and some food. The city is reachable from Paris for a day trip, so coachloads of American tourists joined us in competing for a lunch table in the sun.
Our visit was unusual in that it took place to a soundtrack of African music. A wedding seemed to be ongoing at the time. For me the highlight though was the statuary above the portals and rood screen – some of the most ornate I have seen and, perhaps due to being indoors, very well preserved.
After Chartres we got back on the road and headed southwest toward the Loire Valley and our accommodation for the week south of Tours. Europe was in the midst of a summer heatwave, the landscape yellow and parched. Fortunately for Michael this did not seem to have affected the wheat crop, allowing us to pass the time spotting dozens of exciting combine harvesters at work in France’s vast arable heartland.
In 2016 – before we were married and before we had children, in an era when we seemed to be travelling every other weekend – Natalie and I visited Padua on a day trip from Venice. Our primary purpose was to go to the Botanical Garden, but there was another collection of buildings with a strong (probably stronger) reputation – Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles. It was not, at the time, a World Heritage Site – but it was on the Tenative List and I had been reading about the history of art so was keen to see some renowned examples from the early Renaissance. In 2021 it was finally inscribed as a WHS so here I describe our impression of it.
The site consists of several sub-sites within the city of Padua – all notable for their early Renaissance frescoes. The Scrovegni Chapel (above and below) is only the most famous of them. It offers a chance to see work by the pioneering painter Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), one of the earliest figures in Renaissance art.
Giotto was the first since the Greeks to paint scenes in the modern sense. For a thousand years the art of representing a scene in a lifelike manner had been forgotten, save for sculpture in the Gothic period. History records Giotto’s genius as having been to rediscover this ability, which involved the use of perspective and the technique of foreshortening. This meant he was not “picture writing” – or telling a story in the manner of a cartoon strip, one static image after another. Instead he followed the advice of the preachers to visualise a biblical scene as it must have appeared in real life. It sounds basic to us, but for a thousand years painters never thought to represent things in a realistic manner – only in a symbolic manner (as in all those altarpieces you see in museums showing isolated figures on gold backgrounds). Giotto was an innovator. He had to answer fundamental questions such as how exactly a man actually stands rather than how conventional wisdom dictated a person should be represented.
The main wall shows a Last Judgement scene. It is full of innovations that were to be borrowed by famous artists. For example, the foreshortening of fallen soldiers was copied by Paolo Uccello in his Battle of San Romano, and the dead soul in Michaelangelo’s own, more famous version of the Last Judgement in Rome.
When you go for a tour it is like visiting Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan. Visits must be pre-booked, then you spend some time in a glass ante-room whilst the interior climate is equalised with that of the chapel. Only then are you allowed in for a chaperoned 15 minute period with the frescoes.
Giotto’s fresco cycle was completed in 1305 at the behest of a wealthy Paduan banker. Enrico Scrovegni wanted a chapel in his own name, to be open to the public but with privileged access (via a special private door) for him and his family.
Chiesa dei SS. Filippo e Giacomo agli Eremitani
Next door to the Scrovegni Chapel is the Eremitani Church. It was severely damaged by an aerial bomb during the Second World War and most of its structure has been rebuilt.
Some of the original frescoes remain, including parts by Andrea Mantegna. Restorers have done an excellent job of tracing out the original frescoes from old photographs and fixing on fragments that were picked up out of the rubble in the places where they belong. This one below is in best condition, though.
Battistero della Cattedrale
Padua Cathedral (above) is unremarkable from the outside (it was never finished). But its baptistery contains something quite special. Commissioned by the wife of the Lord of Padua, it houses the masterpiece of Giusto de’ Menabuoi. I was very impressed with the dome paintings within the baptistery. You can really understand how people felt the glory of God when craning upwards to look at Jesus Christ surrounded by rings of prophets.
Giusto de’ Menabuoi was a generation younger than Giotto, and the master’s influence clearly shows. Prior to Giotto artists were not considered ‘celebrities’ but rather like skilled craftsmen whose names were not important. Gombrich explains that they were like tailors or cabinet-makers nowadays: we appreciate their work but do not generally wonder about the person behind it. So it was with artists prior to the Renaissance, which is why pre-Giotto artists are unknown to us and are often referred to after the piece they created – eg. “Master of the Wilton Diptych”.
The Baptistery was only €3 to get in to, and in my opinion more impressive than the more expensive and difficult-to-book Scrovegni Chapel.
Palazzo della Ragione
Unfortunately the Palazzo Ragione was closed on the Monday we tried to visit (things often are in Italy). You can see the impressive architecture of the place from the outside, but not the frescoes within. We walked around the food markets beneath the building and had some fine sandwiches and wine for a very fair price.
Basilica del Santo
The most impressive building architecturally in Padua is the grand Basilica of Saint Anthony. Although not the city’s designated cathedral, it is often mistaken for it. The numerous domes give it a Byzantine appearance – it would not look out of place in Istanbul. As well as an impressive exterior, it contains notable frescoes, and sculptures, including Donatellos.
Tom Livesey's World Heritage Site blog 