Hvar - The Cathedral and treasury

Towering over the eastern end of the square is the trefoil facade of St Stephen's Cathedral (Katedrala sveti Stjepan; no fixed opening hours - try mornings), a sixteenth-century construction whose spindly four-storey campanile employs the typical Venetian device of having one window on the first floor, two windows on the second, and so on up to the top. The interior is fairly unremarkable save for two notable artworks: a Venetian Madonna and Child (on the fourth altar on the right), a Byzantine-influenced, icon-like image painted in around 1220, which exudes a spiritual calm quite different from the tortured Baroque altarpieces nearby; and a touching fifteenth-century Pieta by Spanish artist Juan Boschetus (in the opposite - south - aisle), although its power is somewhat lessened by being framed within a larger and later work.
Immediately next door to the cathedral, the Bishop's Treasury (riznica; summer daily 9am-noon & 5-7pm; winter 10am-noon) houses a small but fine selection of chalices, reliquaries and embroidery. Look out for a nicely worked sixteenth-century bishop's crozier, carved into the shape of a serpent encrusted with saints and embossed with a figure of the Virgin, attended by Moses and an archangel.

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