On the dome of St Andrew's to admire Paradise

Its diameter measures 25 metres, its height from the ground is almost eighty metres. The dome of the 15th-century basilica of Sant'Andrea, among the first five in Italy with a single dome in terms of size, has now become more intimate. Climbing the 170 steps of a 16th-century staircase accessed through a wooden door at the entrance to the high altar, one truly reaches heaven. A subsequent vertiginous door gives access, in fact, to the balustrade that circles the Paradise painted in 1760 by Giorgio Anselmi, who knew how to fill Filippo Juvarra's round creation with late Baroque scenes. Walking along this daring hanging circle, one becomes aware of the extraordinary feats of the six-metre-high statues positioned in the niches and above all of the majesty of the basilica linked to the figure of Mantegna, whose tomb and two paintings in the chapel frescoed by Correggio it houses. Then one can look out over the panorama of the city, which on clear days can embrace the Veronese mountains, the Euganean Hills, the Apennines, even Monte Rosa and always the three lakes and the medieval rooftops. Finally, descending into the crypt one finds oneself in front of the gold mystery of the Sacred Vases, an extraordinary relic of Christianity donated by Emperor Franz Joseph that holds in two small urns the blood of Christ brought here by a Roman legionary named Longinus.