About me, and why this site is mostly about a quarter of an hour

The thing nobody tells you before they book

This is not a place you can decide to visit. The operator’s own booking page says it plainly: same day reservations cannot be made. There is no queue you can join, no counter you can charm, no quiet Tuesday when they will let you in anyway. Slots open weeks ahead, they are named by date on the operator’s own site, and they go. If you are reading this in Padua for the afternoon, I am sorry, and the booking page explains what to try instead.

The second half is what happens once you are in. A maximum of twenty-five people are admitted per visit. The doors are automatic and they open once on the way in and once on the way out, which is not theatre — it is how the interior microclimate is held steady in a room whose plaster is seven hundred years old. And the operator states that visits last about fifteen minutes. Not the tour: the visit. A listing that sells you two hours is selling you a guide for most of that and the chapel for a quarter of an hour (the clock, taken apart).

Which is why half of this site is about the paintings

Fifteen minutes with no idea what you are looking at is fifteen minutes gone, and I have watched it happen from the back of the room. People spend the first five turning in circles. So the other half of this site is the part a booking page has no reason to write: three tiers of narrative panels and what is on them, a barrel vault painted as a sky full of stars, fourteen grey figures pretending to be carved stone, and the Universal Judgement filling the wall you turn round to see on your way out. Read the frescoes on the train. It is the cheapest thing you can do to improve the visit.

What I can and cannot sell you

The chapel is the operator’s. It sells its own admission, at its own published price, through its own booking site, and one ticket also covers the Eremitani Museum and Palazzo Zuckermann — every day except Mondays, which is a trap I have watched catch people who planned a week around it. What the operator charges, what the concession and school rates are, and how a resold listing compares with all of that, is set out in one place and one place only: tickets. It is there as a table with the unit in every cell, because two listings in this catalogue are priced per party with the party capped in the same breath, and one states no unit at all. A figure without its unit is a figure a family of four can be badly wrong about.

What the booking platform sells at this address is mostly a guide standing beside you in those fifteen minutes, and one listing that is the ticket itself, resold with an audio guide. Both are legitimate. Which is worth it depends on whether you would rather pay somebody to know where to look or spend an evening learning it yourself, and I have tried to give you what you need to answer that rather than answering it for you (all thirteen listings, compared).

Where the facts here come from

Hours, slot times, the fifteen minutes, the twenty-five people, the five minutes early, the half hour for groups, the tariff and the closed Monday all come from the operator’s own visitor and booking pages. Where anything else disagrees with those pages, those pages win. The inscription, and the wording about Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles, are UNESCO’s and are quoted as UNESCO wrote them (why it is famous).

What a listing includes comes off its own page, read to the bottom rather than skimmed off the summary box, and quoted directly wherever the exact wording is doing the work. That habit exists because I have been confidently wrong. The best-reviewed guided listing on this site does not use the words admission ticket anywhere in its inclusions — it itemises a guided visit and access to the works — and I would have told you otherwise if I had not gone back and read it.

The story about the perfect circle is Vasari’s, written two and a half centuries after Giotto died, and it is labelled as his every time it appears (the circle). So is the claim that Cimabue taught him. Both are worth telling. Neither is a document.

Four things this site will not do

It will not give the chapel a score out of five. Every rating in my catalogue belongs to a product: a guide’s two hours, a booking somebody else made, an evening walk. Averaging those into a mark for a room painted between 1303 and 1305 would be inventing a measurement and printing it as though somebody had taken it.

It will not tell you how many scenes there are. A number is quoted everywhere, the sources do not agree, and I have not found it on the operator’s own pages. So this site describes three tiers of narrative panels, says what is on each of them, and leaves the counting to somebody who can cite it.

It will not put a country next to a reviewer’s name. The extraction that produced my seventy-four written reviews did not recover them, so no reviewer on this site has one. Guessing from a first name is how an Italian reviewer becomes Argentinian in print.

It will not invent a length for the film. Reviewers on two listings describe watching something before they went in, and I have quoted them saying so. The operator’s pages I have read do not mention it, the accounts that give it a length do not agree with each other, and none of them is the operator. The same goes for the evening opening: the programme is real and has a name, and no length for it is published anywhere I have looked (hours and slots).

Who pays for this

You do, indirectly, and only if you book something. A tour booked from a link here pays me a small percentage out of the platform’s end and adds nothing to your side of it. The whole arrangement, including the uncomfortable part, is on the disclosure page.

Corrections are the messages I answer first. Slots move, listings get rewritten overnight, a meeting point changes. Tell me and I will change the page.