Construction began around 1232, just a year after Anthony of Padua's death, wrapping a growing basilica around the small church of Santa Maria Mater Domini where he had already been buried; the result, completed in essentially its present form by 1310, blends Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine influences into a skyline of domes and slender towers that still locals simply call "il Santo." Pilgrims have never really stopped coming: the saint's tomb chapel, its walls carved with nine marble relief scenes of his miracles by multiple Renaissance sculptors, still draws a steady stream of visitors touching the marble in front of it.
Donatello, working in Padua from 1443 to 1453, cast the bronze reliefs and statues for the high altar, then, in the piazza outside, created the Gattamelata, the first full-scale bronze equestrian monument since antiquity and a work that revived a form Roman sculptors had mastered a thousand years earlier. Two of the basilica's chapels also form part of a UNESCO-listed fresco cycle recognized in 2021.
