Discover Vicenza

Vicenza sits on the Po Valley floor where two rivers meet, the Bacchiglione and the Retrone, with the wooded Colli Berici rising immediately to the south. That abrupt edge between plain and hills is the city's defining feature: it is why the villas were built where they were, on slopes with a view over the flat farmland their owners' money came from.

Roman Vicetia was a modest town on the road between Verona and Padua. Its transformation came in the 16th century, when a local building committee gave a stonemason named Andrea di Pietro della Gondola a series of public commissions and he became Palladio. Vicenza spent the following four centuries as a Venetian provincial city, was bombed heavily in 1944, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994.

Vicenza's culture runs on two things that rarely appear in the same sentence: Renaissance architecture and gold. It is a UNESCO city built by one architect, and simultaneously one of Europe's principal goldsmithing centres, with a trade fair that empties the hotels twice a year. Its food is emphatically its own -- salt cod, and a cheese-and-cornmeal cooking that owes nothing to the coast.

Vicenza is the closest thing there is to a built manifesto. Palladio's method -- classical orders applied to ordinary civic and domestic buildings, in brick and stucco rather than the marble his models used -- is visible along a single street, and the honesty of those materials is part of the point: this was expensive-looking architecture achieved cheaply.

Vicenza has the humid continental climate of the Po Valley -- hot, close summers and cold, foggy winters -- moderated very slightly by the Berici hills at its back. Spring and autumn are short and are much the best times to walk either the city or the hills.