This vast church, with its pretentious and very unwelcoming facade by Palladio covering the friendly red brick, is at the first sight unattractive, so huge and cold and deserted is it.

But it has details.

It has, for example, just inside the door on the entrance wall, high up, a very beautiful early Christian coloured relief of the Madonna and Child: white on blue, but far earlier than the Delia Robbias.

The Madonna is slender as a pole but memorably sweet.

It has also a curious great altar picture on wood by a strange painter, Frater Antonius da Negropon, as he signs himself--this in a little chapel in the right transept--with most charming details of birds, and flowers, and scrolls, and monochrome reliefs surrounding a Madonna and Child who beam comfort and assurance of joy.