Cattedrale di San Pietro apostolo (Duomo)

The Duomo closes the northwest side of Piazza Sordello with a white marble face that few visitors guess is the building's youngest part. Beneath it lies a layered church: early Christian origins, a surviving Romanesque bell tower, a Gothic facade known from a Renaissance painting, and an interior rebuilt by Giulio Romano.

Why it matters

The cathedral of San Pietro apostolo is the seat of the Bishop of Mantua and the architectural summary of the city's history. A church stood here in the early Christian era; a Romanesque rebuild followed, whose bell tower was finished before 1150 and still rises above the north side. Francesco I Gonzaga marked the birth of his firstborn son by commissioning a new Gothic facade from the Venetian brothers Jacobello and Pierpaolo dalle Masegne at the end of the fourteenth century. After a fire in 1545, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga turned to Giulio Romano, who kept the walls and facade but reconceived the interior on the model of the ancient Constantinian St Peter's — a decision that gives Mantua one of the most unusual cathedral interiors in northern Italy.

What to notice

The cathedral has a Latin-cross plan with five aisles separated by four rows of fluted Corinthian columns, evoking the architecture of early Christian Rome. The central and outer aisles run under flat ceilings while the inner side aisles carry barrel vaults, and chapels along the outer aisles hold altarpieces by leading Mantuan Mannerist painters. The Romanesque bell tower, pre-1150, is the oldest visible fabric. The current marble façade was built between 1756 and 1761 by Nicolò Baschiera, an engineer in the Austrian army, at the initiative of Bishop Antonio Guidi di Bagno. Statues of Saints Peter, Paul, Celestine and Anselm stand in the tympanum. The Gothic front survives in part and in Domenico Morone's painting of the expulsion of the Bonacolsi, now in the Ducal Palace.

Context and history

Fire is the recurring protagonist of this building's story — one destroyed the early church in the ninth century, another the medieval fabric in 1545. Giulio Romano worked on the interior until his death in 1546, with Giovan Battista Bertani carrying the project on; later hands added their own layer when Ippolito Andreasi and Teodoro Ghisi painted the ceiling and cupola for Bishop Francesco Gonzaga around 1600. Napoleon's occupation stripped the cathedral of artworks, including a Veronese now in Caen. The baroque marble front of 1756–1761 gave the church the face it keeps today, complete with sculptures by Giovanni Angelo Finali and Giuseppe Tivani. The cathedral is also one of the city's great burying places: Boniface of Canossa, father of Matilde, and Saint Anselm of Lucca lie here, with Gonzaga burials besides — among them Ludovico III and Barbara of Brandenburg, the same couple Mantegna portrayed in the Camera degli Sposi. The cathedral remains an active place of worship and is part of the parish of Sant'Anselmo, which also serves Sant'Andrea.