How Was Trento Built

Trento is a painted city, and the paint was politics.

Frescoed fronts

From the sixteenth century the merchant houses of the centre were frescoed on the outside, partly for display and partly because the bishops wanted a capital that looked like a Renaissance one when the Council brought Europe to town. Many of the fronts on via Belenzani and around Piazza Duomo survive.

The cathedral

San Vigilio is Lombard Romanesque with Gothic additions, begun in the thirteenth century, with a rose window and stair-towers climbing the facade; beneath it an early-Christian basilica was excavated and can be visited.

The castle

The Buonconsiglio is three buildings in one: a thirteenth-century keep, a fifteenth-century Venetian-Gothic courtyard and a sixteenth-century Renaissance palace built for Bishop Bernardo Cles, who wanted somewhere fit to receive the Council.

The Torre Aquila

In a tower of the castle, an anonymous painter around 1400 frescoed the twelve months as scenes of peasants and nobles working and hunting through the year. There is almost no religious content and the detail of ordinary life is unmatched.

The river moved

The Adige was diverted away from the city in the 1850s, which is why the old town now sits some distance from the water and why the railway occupies the former channel.

Santa Maria Maggiore

The church where much of the Council actually sat is plain Renaissance outside and holds a carved marble organ loft of 1534 that is the best single piece of sculpture in the city.

Le Albere

Renzo Piano built a new quarter and MUSE on the site of the Michelin tyre works from 2008, with mixed commercial results and an excellent museum.