Scrovegni Chapel

Scrovegni Chapel tickets: which one to buy

Entry is strictly controlled and cannot be improvised. Tickets are timed to the quarter hour, must be booked at least a day ahead, and admit groups of 25 for exactly fifteen minutes inside, preceded by fifteen minutes in a climate-controlled airlock where a film explains the frescoes while your body heat and humidity are stabilised. Evening slots in summer allow a longer stay for a higher price, which is the one upgrade worth considering.

The ticket also covers the Eremitani civic museum next door, and a city card covering several Padua sites is only slightly dearer. Guided tours of Padua include the chapel entry but cannot extend the fifteen minutes; what they add is preparation beforehand, which matters here more than in most places, because you will not have time to work anything out on your own. Arrive at least ten minutes before your slot or you lose it, with no refund and no later entry.

Visiting Scrovegni Chapel: what to see

Enrico Scrovegni, a Paduan banker whose father Dante had placed in the circle of hell reserved for usurers, built the chapel beside his palace on the site of a Roman arena and had Giotto fresco it between about 1303 and 1305. The result changed European painting. Thirty-eight scenes in three tiers run round the walls, telling the lives of Joachim and Anna, the Virgin and Christ, and the figures in them have weight, backs, and expressions that respond to one another;

the Lamentation, with its huddle of mourners and the angels shrieking overhead, is the scene everyone stops at. The barrel vault is deep blue with gold stars. Over the entrance wall is a Last Judgment in which Scrovegni himself kneels, offering the chapel as a model to the Virgin in what is plainly a transaction for his father's soul. Along the base run monochrome personifications of the Virtues and Vices, painted to look like carved stone.

Scrovegni Chapel opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily, with the first slot in the morning and the last in the early evening, extended into the night in summer. Because entry is capped at 25 people every fifteen minutes, the chapel is never crowded in the ordinary sense; the constraint is the clock, not the crowd. Slots at the edges of the day are easiest to get at short notice. The interior is kept at a fixed temperature and humidity, so the season makes no difference to the experience.

Photography is forbidden and there is no time for it anyway. Bags must be left in the free lockers at the entrance. Padua is half an hour from Venice by train and the chapel alone justifies the trip; the Basilica of St Anthony, the botanical garden and the frescoed halls of the Palazzo della Ragione make a full day. Read about the cycle before you arrive. Padua's other fresco cycles, in the Baptistery and the Palazzo della Ragione, are covered by the same city card and need no booking.