Duomo (Cattedrale di San Vigilio)

Romanesque-Gothic cathedral where the Council of Trent met

The Cattedrale di San Vigilio, on the southern edge of the Piazza Duomo, is a 13th-century Romanesque-Gothic building dedicated to Trento's first Christian bishop, killed (so the legend goes) by hostile pagans in the Val Rendena around 400 AD. The asymmetrical west front, with its rose window and two staircases running diagonally up the inside walls, is unmistakeably the work of the Lombard master mason Adamo d'Arogno.

The interior is austere by Italian standards — bare stone, plain capitals, a single large crucifix above the altar. The crypt contains the supposed remains of Saint Vigilius and a small museum (the Museo Diocesano) in the adjacent Palazzo Pretorio displays the church treasury and a major collection of Flemish tapestries acquired for the Council.

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A story
Most of the formal sessions of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) were held in the cathedral, in a wooden grandstand built across the nave. The Council reshaped the Catholic Church for the next four centuries; almost nothing of the wooden setting survives, but the cathedral's standing — as the room in which the Counter-Reformation was hammered out — has not faded.

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