Abbey Basilica of Santa Giustina

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On the great oval of Prato della Valle rises a vast brick basilica under eight domes, its facade left forever unfinished, built over the tomb of Justina, the young martyr of Padua killed around 304 at sixteen. A Benedictine abbey has stood here since the fifth century, and it guards an astonishing company of the dead. In the left transept, in a marble ark beneath the Madonna of Constantinople, rests the body of Saint Luke the Evangelist, whose feast is today: the physician and companion of Paul, author of the third Gospel and the Acts, who gave us the Magnificat, the shepherds, and the road to Emmaus. His remains, brought from Constantinople, were found here in a leaden coffin in 1117 marked with his symbols, and a modern scientific study begun in the 1990s found them consistent with everything tradition says; a rib was given back to his empty tomb in Thebes. Across the church lies the ark of the apostle Matthias, Veronese's Martyrdom of Saint Justina crowns the high altar, and a corridor of martyrs leads to the chapel of Saint Prosdocimus, Padua's first bishop, the oldest sacred room in the city.