Mantua
Discover Mantua
A concise introduction to Mantua, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Mantua sits in the flat south-eastern corner of Lombardy, close to the Emilian and Venetian borders, with about fifty thousand residents. The Mincio river was dammed in the twelfth century to create three lakes — Superiore, di Mezzo and Inferiore — which wrap the city on three sides and made it defensible.
The centre is compact, flat and largely intact, built around a sequence of linked squares rather than one main piazza. The Palazzo Ducale occupies an entire corner of it, and the Palazzo Te sits about twenty minutes’ walk south, where the Gonzaga built their pleasure villa outside the walls.
UNESCO listed Mantua in 2008 together with Sabbioneta, a purpose-built Renaissance town thirty kilometres away, as a pair illustrating two different Renaissance approaches to city-making — one grown, one designed from nothing.
The city is unusually easy to move around: it is flat, small and full of bicycles.