Soave Town Walls Site Features

The circuit is built of brick and river stone, rising from a battered stone base to a brick upper wall with a covered walkway behind the parapet.

There are twenty-four towers, square and open-backed in the medieval manner -- open to the town so that an enemy who captured one gained no shelter from it.

The merlons are Ghibelline swallowtails, matching the castle and declaring the Scaligeri's imperial allegiance.

Three gates gave access: the Porta Verona to the west, the Porta Vicentina to the east on the road to Vicenza, and the Porta Aquila. The first two survive as substantial gate towers.

The circuit's most distinctive feature is that it does not simply ring the town: two arms climb the hillside to join the castle, so that town and fortress form one continuous defence.

The complete circuit

Roughly a kilometre and a half of wall, unbroken. Seeing the whole enceinte from outside -- best from the plain to the south -- is the single thing that makes Soave worth a detour.

The twenty-four towers

Regularly spaced, square, and open at the rear. Their rhythm along the wall is the circuit's most photographed quality.

Porta Verona and Porta Vicentina

The two surviving gate towers, both still carrying traffic into the town.

The climbing arms

The two stretches that run up the hillside to the castle, which turn a town wall into a single fortification with the fortress above.

The walls enclose a town on flat ground at the very edge of the Verona plain, with the castle hill rising immediately behind it.

From the wall the view divides cleanly in two: south and west, the flat alluvial plain running toward Verona; north and east, the terraced volcanic slopes of the Soave Classico vineyards.

That contrast -- flat farmland on one side, hillside vineyard on the other -- is the geography that the town's whole wine economy rests on, and the wall is the best place to see it.