Discover Palazzo dei Trecento

The palace is a single long rectangular block, deliberately plain: brick walls, a row of tall pointed-arch windows at hall level, and a crenellated roofline. Almost all the architectural effort went into proportion and rhythm rather than ornament.

Beneath it runs an open loggia of wide arches, so the building stands on legs and the square continues underneath it. That is what stops a structure of this bulk from closing the piazza off.

The most instructive detail is the reconstruction line. Rather than disguise the 1944 damage, the rebuilders left a visible horizontal band in the brickwork showing where the original fabric ends and the post-war work begins -- an unusually honest decision for its date.