Palazzo dei Trecento Site Features

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.

The ground-floor loggia

Open, public and continuously used since the middle ages.

The reconstruction line

A deliberate band in the brickwork marking what the 1944 bombing destroyed.

The great hall

The upper chamber where the council of three hundred met, with surviving fresco fragments and podestà coats of arms.

The staircase

The external covered stair linking the loggia to the hall, a common medieval civic arrangement and rarely so intact.

The palace occupies the northern side of Piazza dei Signori, at the exact centre of Treviso's walled oval, with the Palazzo del Podestà and the Torre Civica adjoining it.