Palazzo della Ragione Site Features

The hall measures roughly 81 metres long, 27 wide and 27 high, and its timber roof -- shaped like an inverted ship's hull -- spans the whole of that without a single interior support. It is the reason the building is significant: a medieval structure solving a problem of scale that most contemporaries simply avoided.

The roof form is boat-building logic applied to a room, which in a region of shipwrights is less surprising than it first appears. Loggias run along both long sides, added in the 14th century, giving the upper floor light and the market below its arcades.

At ground level, Sotto il Salone is a continuous vaulted arcade occupied by butchers, cheesemongers and salumerie. It is architecturally the plainest part of the building and by some distance the busiest.

The astrological cycle

Around 333 painted panels covering the hall's walls, arranged as a scheme of months, zodiac signs, planets, trades and saints. Painted in the 1420s and 30s to replace Giotto's lost original, and best read slowly, one register at a time.

The wooden horse

An outsized wooden horse of 1466 stands at one end of the hall, built for a tournament and modelled on Donatello's Gattamelata outside the Basilica of Saint Anthony. It is startling at close range and hard to photograph well.

The roof from inside

Standing in the middle of the hall and looking up is the point of the visit -- the absence of columns is more impressive from beneath than any description of the span makes it sound.

Sotto il Salone

The market arcade below, still trading, and free to walk through. The contrast between the silent hall above and the noise underneath is the building's real character.

The palazzo stands at the centre of Padua's historic core, dividing Piazza delle Erbe from Piazza dei Frutti, with Piazza dei Signori a minute further west.

Its position is the whole logic of the medieval city: market on both sides, courts upstairs, and the political square immediately adjacent. Commerce, justice and government within a hundred metres of each other.

Everything around it is arcaded and flat, so the palazzo's bulk is the only vertical interruption in the middle of the centre -- visible down several streets at once without ever being fully in view.