Padua · Italy
Cappella degli Scrovegni — Giotto's blue heaven
The fresco cycle that changed European painting, seen in groups of 25 for 15 minutes at a time. Timed entry, booked in two minutes.
Book your tickets
Pick your date and entry time below. Be at the chapel entrance 5 minutes before your slot; the visit itself lasts 30 minutes.
Welcome to the Scrovegni Chapel
The room where modern painting began
Around 1305 a Paduan banker named Enrico Scrovegni built a small chapel beside his palace on the site of the Roman arena, and hired Giotto to paint every inch of it. The result — the lives of Mary and Christ under a starry blue vault, with a Last Judgement over the door — is the work that broke with Byzantine flatness and gave figures weight, space and feeling. It has been inscribed by UNESCO as part of Padua's 14th-century fresco cycles.
Discover the chapel
Where would you like to start?
History & Architecture
From a Celtic hillfort to a royal seat, a burnt-out ruin and back again — and the Slovak National Museum’s history collections inside today.
Visitor Info
Tours, seasonal opening hours, tickets and accessibility — everything you need before you arrive.
Bookings
Choose a tour and reserve your date and time online in a couple of minutes.
Find & Navigate
The castle on the map, with directions for your visit.
The visit
Fifteen minutes to acclimatise, fifteen minutes inside
To protect the frescoes, every group of 25 first waits in a climate-controlled room while a short film explains what they are about to see. Then the doors open and you have 15 minutes under Giotto's stars. It is short, it is silent, and nobody who has done it forgets it.
What visitors say
Loved by travellers from around the world
Fifteen minutes sounds like nothing and turns out to be exactly enough — you cannot look at anything else afterwards anyway. Book days ahead in spring.
The evening visit is the one to get: fewer people, the blue vault lit from below. The ticket also gets you into the Eremitani museum next door, which is far better than expected.
We nearly missed our slot — be at the entrance early, they are strict. Padua is 25 minutes from Venice by train and worth the day on its own.